Top headlines: Jeff Bezos to step down, Twitter risks penal action, & more

Business Standard brings you top news of the evening

Jeff Bezos to step down, hand over Amazon reins to cloud chief Andy Jassy

Amazon.com Inc on Tuesday said founder Jeff Bezos would step down as CEO and become executive chairman, as the company reported a third consecutive record profit and quarterly sales above $100 billion for the first time. This summer, Bezos, 57, will hand the keys of the world’s largest online retailer to Andy Jassy, head of its cloud computing division. The announcement ends a long-running question about who would succeed the world’s second-richest person at the company’s helm. Jassy, 53, joined Amazon in 1997 after Harvard Business School, founding Amazon Web Services (AWS) and growing it to a cloud platform used by millions, the company’s website said. Read more

Airtel logs record quarterly revenue in Q3 

Continuing its turnaround in earnings during the past few quarters, telecom operator Airtel returned to the black and reported a profit of Rs 853.6 crore for the quarter ended December 31, 2020, (Q3FY21). The telco posted its highest ever consolidated quarterly revenue for the quarter under review. The revenue from operations increased 24 per cent to Rs 26,518 crore Read more

RBI unveils risk-based audit guidelines for select NBFCs, urban co-op banks

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Wednesday unveiled the risk-based internal audit (RBIA) system for select non-bank lenders and urban co-operative banks, with a view to enhance the quality and effectiveness of their internal audit system. All the deposit-taking non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) and the ones with an asset size of over Rs 5,000 crore, and urban co-operatives banks (UCBs) with assets of over Rs 500 crore will have to migrate to the new system, the RBI said. Currently, all the entities supervised by the RBI have their own approaches on internal audit, resulting in certain inconsistencies, risks and gaps in the system, the RBI said. Read more

Twitter risks penal action for defying govt's legal orders under IT Act

The government said Twitter may face penal action for not complying with legal orders to remove tweets and content about to a farmer protest-related hashtag that contained the word 'genocide'. In a communication to the microblogging platform on Tuesday evening, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said Twitter "unilaterally" unblocked tweets and accounts that were using #ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide beginning Saturday. Read more

Services PMI expands for 4th straight month as vaccine drive fuels optimism

Activity in India’s services sector expanded for the fourth straight month in January as the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out drove business optimism, a private survey showed on Wednesday. The IHS India Services Business Activity Index rose to 52.8 in January from 52.3 in December, suggesting the pace of growth was moderate. The 50-point mark separates expansion from contraction. But it should be noted that the PMI is a month-over-month indicator, showing improvement over the previous month, and not over the previous year. Read more