International Business

India Wants to Keep Stake in Profitable Firms: The government wants to reduce its equity in most profitable state-owned enterprises to 51% but does not plan to sell the companies outright, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh said. “As regards loss-making ones, if there are people in the private sector who can turn around these projects, we are willing to hand them over 100%,” Singh told Euromoney magazine in an interview. The central government has invested more than $50 billion in 240 enterprises it owns. For the year ended March 31, 1994, 120 of them were profitable and 117 ran at a loss. The government did not say what happened to the other three.