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Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, co-founders of India's largest e-commerce company, Flipkart, were reviewing the foregoing Facebook post, which had gone viral and received more than 20,000 likes. A third-party seller listed a pair of women's sandals on Flipkart's website at 799 Indian rupees and offered it on promotion at 399. However, upon close examination of the product's display photo, consumers noticed a 399 price tag printed on the strap. Consistent with stated goals of transparency and building trusted relationships with customers, the Bansals immediately drafted an apology and terminated the seller's agreement with Flipkart.

Bharti Infratel, a telecom tower company provides shared telecom infrastructure to mobile operators in India. It is a spin off from Bharti Airtel, India's largest leading mobile services operator. Bharti Infratel partnered with its rivals, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, to form a joint venture, Indus Towers, to pool and share the three companies' tower assets. The managing director of Bharti Infratel's parent group, Bharti Enterprises must decide if he should merge Bharti Infratel with Indus Towers.

This case examines the progress made by Starbucks in its first two years of operation in India.

Starbucks entered India in late 2012. This case explores Starbucks' globalization strategy, its success in China, and its vision for India. The case asks whether Starbuck can replicate its success in China in India.

Café Coffee Day (CCD) is the largest coffee retailer in India. In 2012, Starbucks entered the India market. This case explores CCD's competitive advantages, its analysis of Starbuck's entry strategy, and how it might respond to Starbucks' entry.

This case is an update of "Coffee Wars in India: Café Coffee Day 2013." It explores Café Coffee Day's progress after Starbuck's entry into India and the decisions it faces in 2015.

It is January 2014 and Rahul Sharma, cofounder of Micromax Informatics (Micromax), the largest Indian mobile handset company, is preparing for an emergency conference call with his private equity investors. In the last six years, Micromax had grown its annual product revenues from $54M to over $1B. Unfortunately, it was difficult for the founding team to keep up with Micromax's rapid growth, triggering a series of missteps in 2010 that brought the company close to catastrophe. In response, investors had convinced Sharma and his cofounders to hire their first outside CEO, Deepak Mehrotra, and several senior professionals. With the founders working alongside the new "professionals," frequent overlaps and sometimes run-ins occurred. Now, both Mehrotra and the head of their smartphone division had resigned. Sharma evaluates their options: Would the founders need to reconsider their involvement in the company they created? Or was there still a middle ground where both founders and professionals could coexist in the business?

In the early 1970s BRAC was a startup nongovernmental organization (NGO) working in Bangladesh. By 2014, it was the world's largest NGO. It had a strong presence in Bangladesh and had begun to deliver social development programs in nine other countries. Its founder and chairperson Fazle Hasan Abed was knighted in 2010 by the British Crown for his service in reducing poverty. The organization took a holistic approach to alleviating poverty, which depended on providing the poor with a portfolio of services including education, agriculture development, healthcare, community empowerment, and microfinance. Around 70% of the funding to deliver BRAc's development programs and services came from its own for-profit social enterprises. The case study allows students to examine the organization's evolution and its business model.

Indus Towers, the world's largest telecom tower company, is a joint venture between three telecom rivals in India. These rivals-Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, and Idea Cellular-combined their telecom towers to provide "shared telecom infrastructure" to wireless telecom operators on a nondiscriminatory basis. The CEO has transformed Indus from a struggling startup with a monopolistic mindset into a customer-centric organization. He now wants to grow Indus. To achieve this, however, he needs to reconcile conflicting objectives among Indus's shareholders. All three shareholders are also his customers; often these dual roles engender different perspectives and lead to different requirements. The CEO needs to determine how to convince the board to take a decision that keeps Indus's best interests in mind while balancing the operators' interests.

Axis Bank is India's third largest private sector bank. In April 2009, Shikha Sharma, an outsider was appointed as its CEO. She took over from a person who had overseen ten years of rapid growth at the bank. The selection of an outsider as the new CEO surprised many inside and outside the bank. Sharma changed the bank's hierarchical culture, strengthened the core team by appointing new talent where needed, sought to build its core processes and infrastructure, and filled several gaps in its business portfolio. Despite these changes, the stock market continues to undervalue Axis Bank compared with its chief rivals. In light of this, Axis Bank needs to figure out what more it needs to do to ensure that the market values the franchise correctly.

Axis Bank is India's third largest private sector bank. In April 2009, Shikha Sharma, an outsider, was appointed as its CEO. She took over from a person who had overseen ten years of rapid growth at the bank. The selection of an outsider as the new CEO surprised many inside and outside the bank. Sharma changed the bank's hierarchical culture, strengthened the core team by appointing new talent where needed, sought to build its core processes and infrastructure, and filled several gaps in its business portfolio. Despite these changes, the stock market continues to undervalue Axis Bank compared with its chief rivals. In light of this, Axis Bank needs to figure out what more it needs to do to ensure that the market values the franchise correctly.

Aditya Birla Financial Services Group is a large, broad-based, Indian financial services institution offering products ranging from life insurance and mutual funds to private equity. The company has witnessed a turnaround in recent years and regained lost market share. However, in recent years, concerns about investor protection has increased financial sector regulatory oversight specifically in the asset management and life insurance space and changed the rules of the game. Additionally, the central bank has invited new banks to apply for licenses to operate in the country. In the face of these changes, the company has to figure out what its strategy should be to realize its vision of becoming a leading integrated financial services player offering customers a menu of products that support their needs at different stages of their life.

Three years had passed since Blackstone's investment in Intelenet Global Services, their third largest investment in India. Great progress had been made, but now a new challenge loomed. Globank, a large global bank, was Intelenet's largest customer. Intelenet's contract with Globank was set to expire in the next seven months, and all of Intelenet's assets and people working on the account, would move to Globank. Amit Dixit, managing director at the Blackstone Group, estimated that in the next four years this would result in Intelenet losing $160 million of revenue and $48 million of EBITDA. Blackstone could either channel large amounts of capital and human resources towards renewing the contract, or focus on growing third-party business at Intelenet. Dixit had to firm up his strategy quickly in order to begin negotiations with Globank.

Anti-corruption web platform "ipaidabribe.com" leverages the transparency and anonymity of the Internet to encourage private citizens in India who have been the victims of corruption to self-report details of bribes paid, including the bribe amount, the name of the corrupt official, and services rendered. The ipaidabribe.com portal then aggregates these data to create maps and charts of corrupt activities across Indian cities. The theory is that such data will build awareness and shame, raising the cost of corruption. But after initial successes-buoyed by visibility generated from mass street protests against corruption in 2011-traffic to the website has slowed. The question before spouses, ex-bankers, and ipaidabribe.com co-founders Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan is how to generate and sustain interest in the web platform so that they have real impact on retail corruption in India. Possible solutions discussed include teaming up with local governments and police, focusing attention on one or two Indian cities, and franchising ipaidabribe.com internationally to create more visibility.

Global electrical products company assesses growth and market demands in India. Company must decide between a products acquisition or developing a service business. Students need to be aware of different country conditions, demands on implementation of different strategies, impact on culture. Also discusses energy performance contracting in the context of making India energy generation capability more efficient.

Supplement to case 710008.

February 2011: O.P. Bhatt reflected contentedly on his five-year term as Chairman of State Bank of India (SBI), India's largest commercial bank. He had led SBI on a journey of transformation from an old, hierarchical, transaction oriented, government bank to a modern, customer focused, and technologically advanced universal bank. In 2006, when Bhatt assumed leadership, SBI had been losing market share for over two decades to private and foreign banks. Analysts and industry observers had predicted that at the prevailing growth rates ICICI Bank, a private bank launched in 1994, would overtake SBI in terms of deposits in four years. However, by 2010, SBI had more than doubled its profits, deposits and advances; regained market share and won the Asian Banker Achievement award for the strongest bank in the Asia Pacific region.