RBI: Earnings on foreign currency assets at 1.45%

The RBI holds 557.8 tonnes of gold, of which 265.5 tonnes is held abroad in safe custody with the Bank of England and the Bank for International Settlements.

This forms about 7.9 per cent of the total foreign exchange reserves in dollar terms as on September 27, 2013, according to the half-yearly report on the management of forex reserves put out by the Reserve Bank of India. Foreign exchange reserves were at $277 billion as of end-September 2013. They were at $294 billion at the end of February 2014.

The report also said as at end-September 2013, of the total foreign currency assets of $248.8 billion, $155.7 billion was invested in securities, $86.6 billion was deposited with other central banks, BIS and the IMF and the remaining $6.6 billion comprised deposits with foreign commercial banks and funds placed with external asset managers.

The rate of earnings on foreign currency assets was at 1.45 per cent during the July 2012-June 2013 period, little changed from the performance in the previous year. (RBI follows the July-June year for its accounts).

Government to buy back bonds worth Rs 15,000 crore

To ensure adequate liquidity in the banking system at a time when the quarterly advance tax outgo is coinciding with an Rs 30,000-crore term repo maturity, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday evening announced that government would be buying back Rs 15,000 crore worth of bonds maturing between May and February 2015 by utilizing "its surplus cash balances" with RBI.

The buyback, which would take place on March 18, would purely be ad hoc in nature. It shall not be an open market operation, which the central bank conducts to manage liquidity in the system, nor a "debt switch" either, in which the government had earlier proposed to buy bonds maturing in the short-term and replace it with longer period debt. Once bought back, these bonds will cease to exist unlike bonds bought by the RBI under open market operations.

The bonds that the government will buyback are 6.07%, 2014 bond, 10%, 2014 bond, 7.32%, 2014 bond, 10.50%, 2014 bond, 7.56%, 2014 paper, 11.83%, 2014 bond and 10.47%, 2015.

This in addition with its planned Rs 50,000-crore infusion through a term repo auction, will infuse a total of about Rs 65,000 crore into the system in aggregate. Consequentially, this will leave about net Rs 35,000 crore funds in the system given the Rs 30,000-crore term repo maturity, which would able to to take care of the advance tax outgo.

MphasiS Q1 net declines 2% to Rs 180.6 crore

MphasiS HP-owned IT services firm today reported a 2 percent fall in consolidated net profit at Rs 180.6 crore for the first quarter ended January 31, 2014. The Bangalore-based firm had posted a net profit of Rs 184.4 crore in the year-ago period, it said in a BSE filing.

Consolidated revenues for the November-January quarter of FY2013-14 rose 24.4 percent to Rs 1,564 crore against Rs 1,257 crore for the same quarter a year ago. The firm follows November-October as the fiscal year.

In the August-October quarter of 2013 fiscal, MphasiS had reported a consolidated net profit of Rs 190.2 crore and revenues of Rs 1,594 crore. Commenting on the performance, MphasiS CEO Ganesh Ayyar said: "We are building an innovation-led, high value, specialised and customer focussed organisation. We firmly believe IT services in its current state would cease to exist in times to come.The firm's cash and cash equivalents rose by Rs 159 crore in the reported quarter to Rs 2,647 crore.