Daybreak

India's biggest quick commerce players — Blinkit, Instamart, and Zepto — are on a mission. They are frantically hunting for properties they can convert into dark stores.  Dark stores are an integral part of any quick commerce strategy. Especially now, that the lines between quick commerce and e-commerce are very quickly blurring. People aren't just ordering pantry staples anymore. They are also pl...

Young independent doctors in India are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Take F M, a 32-year-old psychiatrist who has a clinic in South Mumbai. She’s spent a third of her life slogging through medical schools and internships to finally earn her super-specialised degree. But two years into her private practice in a posh South Mumbai area, she wonders if being a doctor is really worth it. Nearl...

In this episode of Daybreak, hosts Snigdha and Rahel try something new — instead of the usual monologue or interview, they cover three of the biggest social media stories from around the world.  The first is Brazil's ban on the Elon Musk-owned microblogging platform, X. The feud between Musk and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes traces back to April, when the judge ordered the suspension o...

What put iPhone city on the map is that it produces more than half of the world’s iPhone’s every single year. The global demand for the Apple iPhone has only increased over the years. To keep up with that demand Foxconn hires up to 200,000 workers – a mix of migrants and college students – to make sure that the assembly lines keep running. Especially during the peak season which happens to begin r...

Back in 2022, e-commerce giant Flipkart’s 35 billion dollar universe was left with a gaping fintech hole after the payments app Phonepe was spun off. There a brief period, after that, when it wasn’t clear whether Flipkart would ever try to dip its toes in consumer payments play again.  But then again, this is Flipkart. Here is a company that has a finger in every pie – from online travel, fashion,...

Half of the world’s electric cars are on China’s roads, thanks to a wave of smart incentives for both consumers and manufacturers, such as tax breaks and purchase subsidies. The payoff is tangible: the smog that once shrouded some major cities has lifted, and road noise has dropped significantly. But it brought unexpected costs and challenges that nobody saw coming. Tune in Don't forget to s end u...

A few years ago, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy had set a target of 40% growth across all categories for Flipkart. But in 2023, it was still stuck at 20%. So the company is now on a mission. It wants to push growth, gain market share, and turn a profit. So in January 2024, Flipkart's top execs along with the CEO came together for a meeting to outline a roadmap for 2024. Krishnamurthy wanted Fli...

Meet Shaik Salauddin, a 38-year-old cab driver from Hyderabad, who is fighting for the rights of eight million gig workers from across the country. While India's gig economy is burgeoning, the workers on whose backs it is built barely enjoy any rights or legal protections. Salauddin realised this early on and in 2019, after five years of relentless pursuit, the Indian Federation of App-based Trans...

For nearly two decades, Abhishek Ganguly worked as the managing director of Puma, the German athleisure brand in India. In that period alone, the brand’s revenue shot up from Rs 20 crore to close to Rs 4,000 crore. Under Ganguly, Puma even managed to beat its longtime rival Adidas to become a market leader.  In 2023, Ganguly decided to quit and start his own venture called Agilitas Sports with two...

Back when it was launched in 2020, Bajaj Finsev Health had a clear plan: it wanted to provide a complete healthcare package to its consumers.  And it did that by happily playing a supporting role in India’s booming healthcare industry.  Here's what Bajaj Finserv Health does. It is essentially a health management platform. So it facilitates things like doctor consultations and health checkups to it...

Subway, the globally popular sandwich-eatery chain, is now grappling with sweeping changes in India—and not for the better. For one, the world’s largest quick-service restaurant (QSR) brand is moving away from the franchise model it has operated under for the past 25 years. In doing so, it’s also shedding the very thing that made it popular in the first place: choice. Tune in. Don't forget to s en...

Last month, a Twitter post a Bengaluru-based IT professional about getting a laptop delivered from Flipkart went viral on social. The reason? Flipkart’s quick delivery arm called Minutes that went live in select cities had delivered it to him at a Starbucks cafe in 13 minutes. But Minutes is Flipkart’s third attempt at quick delivery. And the real test is actually around the corner when the Big Bi...

Back in the late 2000s when Byju's was founded, it was best known for teaching students how to 'hack' competitive examinations like the CAT. They taught students how to work backwards from the answer and use a bunch of shortcuts to get the highest score possible. The art of 'hacking' examinations was something that the company's founder, Byju Raveendran, was the master of. Or at least that's how t...

The real-estate market of Delhi-NCR is an anomaly. The Ken spoke to a bunch of potential homebuyers who are looking for premium apartments with budgets of up to 2.5 crore rupees.  Real-estate experts are telling them to give up on their dreams. Lately, the national capital has been facing an acute supply crunch of new housing projects, especially in the mid-premium segment (80 lakh to 2 crore rupe...

India's tuition republic came into the picture to fill the gaps in the education system. First and foremost: they promise to get you into the college of your dreams. That simple but powerful promise has made this a Rs 58,000 crore industry.  But there is a flip side to this. It puts traditional schools in a rather precarious position. Students start trickling out of the system after class 10. Thei...

On Independence Day this year, just six days after it went public, Ola Electric launched three new electric motorbikes. This was a bold move, especially considering that  electric vehicles haven’t really clicked with the Indian audience yet.  The exception to that rule has been electric two and three wheelers, which had some unexpected success in tier-2 India. But motorcycles are not scooters. Peo...

Three days ago, Rapido, the bike taxi company, became India’s latest unicorn after it raised $200 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. The funding round which was led by WestBridge Capital also saw new investors put in their money into the company. In an interview to the ET , CEO Aravind Sanka said that the funds will be used to expand Rapido's newly launched four-wheeler taxi service, which...

"Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly." Last month, Judge Amit P Mehta of of US District Court for the District of Columbia delivered a historic ruling against one of the biggest technology companies in the world. Google was accused of abusing its dominance by paying the likes of Apple and Samsung billions of dollars to make its search engine the default option o...

Dunzo, the Reliance Retail-backed quick delivery company, let go off 75% of its workforce in fresh round of layoffs earlier this week. But for the longest time, Dunzo has been an anomaly. Its a small company that has managed to make its name a verb. Like Google but Google is a giant.  Its revenue was just $7 million dollars in the year that ended in 2022. For perspective, Zomato made more than 70...

There was once a time, not very long ago, when every company wanted to be a fintech. Food delivery, ride hailing, e-commerce – companies that you would not otherwise associate with financial services.  And when you think about it, it does add up. A couple years ago, fintech was where the money was at. Indian fintechs received nearly 9 billion dollars in funding in calendar year 2021. It was one th...

In the last decade, the number of people covered by health insurance has more than doubled.  Of course, big hospitals – both the state funded ones and the private ones that look a lot like five-star resorts – are making the most of it. They are really raking it in.  But there is a sizeable chunk of the healthcare system that is left out. The small, private hospitals that make up nearly 85 per cent...

For a while now, some of the biggest players in India’s third-party logistics industry have been riding on the success of e-commerce unicorn Meesho. As of 2023, it accounted for over half of the 2.5 billion shipments that were being handled by third-party logistics players. Companies like Delhivery and Ecom Express happily rose to the occasion and partnered with Meesho to handle all its order deli...

When it comes to electric vehicles, China is the crownless king. Nothing new there. But what was news to us was when Bhavish Aggarwal recently announced at an event that his company, Ola Electric, is the world’s largest electric two-wheeler manufacturer and the fourth-largest EV company in the world.  It left everyone scratching their heads for a few seconds until they noticed the fine print at th...

A big reason when we choose to buy online instead of going to a store depends on how easy the e-commerce company makes it to return stuff. So far, with most companies, all you have to do is ask for a return on the app or website and someone comes to your doorstep and picks it up. While e-commerce companies have been wooing you with the option, in reality they hate returns because reverse logistics...

There was once a time, not too long ago,  when you could walk into a young working professional’s rented home in a tier-1 city, and all the furniture would look pretty familiar.  About a decade ago, everyone and their uncle was renting furniture from the two OG rental platforms Rentomojo and Furlenco. It just made sense.  When Rentomojo and Furlenco were launched about a decade ago, they were like...