A look back at some of our biggest and best stories from this week. In case you missed them, here's a recap:

Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman says govt slashing corporate tax rates for domestic companies

The measures announced by the finance minister will be positive for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies like GSK Consumer, Nestle, ITC and Hindustan Unilever as their current corporate tax rates stand at 35 percent, 34 percent, 32 percent and 29 percent, respectively.

Hitting new boundaries: Brand IPL valued at Rs 47,500 crore, up 13.5% YoY

Four-time winner Mumbai Indians, Chennai Super Kings continue their climb up brand value ladder while poor on-field performance sees Kolkata Knight Riders, Royal Challengers Bangalore shed brand value.

Government’s fiscal headroom squeezed as growth in tax revenues slumps

Lower economic growth is likely to hit tax buoyancy in FY20, thus creating a stiff challenge for the government to achieve its tax estimates. Sources say the tax targets, particularly FY20 direct taxes, are looking difficult to achieve and also looking at the lower growth impulse.

Renting a cab versus owning a car: It is more than just numbers

You might have seen forwards on WhatsApp and other social media in the form of an analysis, where the comparative cost of hiring a cab versus buying a car is shown, with the conclusion that renting a cab makes more sense. Personal finance strategist Rishabh Parakh helps us understand the calculations.

Sweet success: Why these bean-to-bar chocolate brands are growing 100% year on year

Bean-to-bar chocolate makers work with raw cacao beans sourced from farms. These beans are roasted, winnowed and ground into chocolate. They eschew the use of emulsifiers and synthetic flavours, among others, and are focused on transparency and sustainability.

Why did India outlaw vapes? Here’s how the ban impacts public health and economy

Vaping, promoted as a technology less harmful than traditional smoking, has now been banned in India following finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman's announcement. The government ban covers the production, manufacturing, import, export, transport, sale, distribution, and storage of e-cigarettes as well as advertisements promoting them.

Meet this engineer from Ranchi, the brain behind Amazon Alexa

Rohit Prasad, who breathed life into Alexa, on Wednesday said interpreting commands was a big challenge while developing Amazon's voice assistant. Jharkhand-born Prasad, who is the vice president and head scientist of Alexa Artificial Intelligence at Amazon, said, "We wanted to invent technology where customers could interact just with voice. The fact that you do not need to hold a device to interact with computers that unleash many more possibilities. While you are cooking you can talk to Alex and get your favourite tune, so that is the simplification we have talked about."

Around 50% of Jet Airways slots at state-run airports still vacant

The airline grounded operations for a temporary but indefinite period on April 17 and vacated 346 slots at airports run by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and over 400 at private-run airports, as per the documents reviewed by CNBC-TV18.

Overcoming gender bias in the workplace: A how-to guide from a feminist scholar

Being a working woman means juggling responsibilities with the other roles you are expected to fulfil — as a mother, daughter-in-law, wife, not to mention sister and daughter. But in the office, you have to keep all these aside and perform to the best of your abilities. Is that even possible? Can you park personal worries in some drawer and not stress about it at work? What do you even get professionally for doing this? You would think the top job, once in a while. Or equal pay all of the time.

Mumbai airport now has more domestic seats on offer than it did when Jet Airways was flying

Remember the capacity crunch in Mumbai after the grounding of Jet Airways? Turns out that the Mumbai airport now has more seats on offer on domestic routes than it had when Jet operated its complete schedule. This is despite the fact that the airport has not given away all the slots of Jet Airways – be it domestic or international.

CNBC-TV18 Exclusive: Top 5 takeaways from RBI Governor interview

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das sat down with CNBC-TV18’s Latha Venkatesh and took questions on several topics, from the Indian economy slowing down with the GDP growth coming in at s percent for the first quarter of this fiscal to the impact of the drone attacks on Saudi Aramco’s facility.

Facebook and Google: Do brands love them or hate them? Or both?

You could now create your product/service, do an effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to ensure people discovered it, whenever they searched for the category. With small budgets, you could also use Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and get across to users, a little more strongly. With social media platforms like Facebook, you could amplify your word-of-mouth and could generate better referrals by engaging with your customer base, even if they purchased your product through some intermediary or retail network.

Air India was due to be operationally profitable the coming year. So what happened?

Air India has reported a loss of Rs 8,640 crore for the 2018-19 financial year. This, despite a domestic market share of 12.9 percent and an international market share of 68 percent. The balance sheet continues to be extremely weak with Rs 29,000 crore of debt (the debt has been halved, from the previous 58,000 crores, thanks to the creation of a special purpose vehicle).

One company in Kerala is laughing all the way to the bank thanks to Malayalis' love for booze

Kerala is often discussed as a graveyard for business. Few companies thrive because of a virulent culture of militant trade union activism in the state. But there is one enterprise whose business is booming. The revenues of the enterprise in question — Kerala State Beverages Corporation (KSBC) — are actually growing at a fast clip annually.

Pulitzer Prize winner, cancer expert Siddhartha Mukherjee on his upcoming books, dislike for social media and love for writing

The Delhi-born haematologist is a cancer physician, researcher and assistant professor at Columbia University. Mukherjee is also the author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction, and The Laws of Medicine. A Rhodes scholar, who graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School, Mukherjee has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell.

First Published:Sept 20, 2019 12:48 PM IST