Bharti Group chairman Sunil Mittal, the billionaire who controls India’s biggest mobile-phone operator, is looking to pump more than US$1 billion into a hotel chain founded by his son-in-law in London, people with knowledge of the matter said.
The money from Mittal would fund acquisitions by Sharan Pasricha’s Ennismore, a developer that owns the Gleneagles resort and Hoxton hotel chain, which is expanding in the US and Europe, said the people, who asked not to be identified, as the matter is private.
The injection would come from a Bharti unit that handles Mittal’s family wealth and would help Pasricha acquire and convert properties in trendy urban areas in US and European cities into hotels aimed at younger travelers.
Hoxton, known for its casual atmosphere and affordable rates, operates two hotels in the London neighborhoods of Shoreditch and Holborn, and one each in Amsterdam and Paris. The brand has 667 rooms across the three cities.
Ennismore said in an e-mail that it partners with Bharti Global, which makes investments for the Mittal family, and declined to comment further.
Pasricha, who is married to Mittal’s daughter Eiesha, ran a media startup, then a leather-goods factory and a private equity investment firm before getting into the hotel business.
Pasricha acquired the first Hoxton in Shoreditch, an East London neighborhood known for street art. The second in Holborn in 2014 was followed by a branch in Amsterdam in 2015 and in Paris last year.
Hoxton is developing hotels in New York City’s hip neighborhood of Williamsburg, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, with plans to start opening some of them this year, its Web site said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
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