Daybreak

No one was surprised by Vishal Mega Mart’s stellar market debut last week. After all, institutional and retail investors oversubscribed 27X to the Rs 8,000 crore IPO. So when it listed at a considerable premium, most people saw it coming.  But, how did the 23-year-old value retailer get to this point?  Well, in the last few years, Vishal, which has 70 per cent of its stores in tier 2 and smaller c...

For most Indians, a cup of good chai is a comfort that’s accessible. Coffee chains, on the other hand, are mostly premium. And it all adds up when one considers the fact that Indians consume 20 cups of tea for every cup of coffee. But we live in a time when opulence and luxury makes us go google eyed. In the Indian consumer market, premiumisation is no longer a choice. Even chai cafes chains don’t...

This isn't your usual Daybreak Friday episode.  Considering it's the end of the year, we thought we’d ask the reporters in our newsroom to talk to us about the stories they liked best. This week, we have DVLS Pranathi and Shristi Achar on the show. They share two of their favourite stories — First, Pranathi tells us about an unconventional new homegrown footwear company started by three former Pum...

Category managers have shifted from routine e-commerce roles to powerful decision-makers in quick commerce. They now manage the limited shelf space in dark stores and decide which products get visibility on platforms like Instamart, Zepto, and Blinkit.  Naturally, brands are aggressively courting them, with over 30,000 requests every month for just 150 slots. From hosting parties to taking them ou...

Back in 2016, the Internet and Mobile Association of India set up an all new club for what was then a very small cohort of digital leaders in corporate India. It was called the all-India Chief Digital Officer club.  Back then, there were only about five-six CDOs that were members. The point of the initiative was to give legitimacy to this new, emerging role. But soon enough, the initiative fizzled...

Back in 1949, XLRI introduced India to management studies.  Since then, it has managed to become one of the most sought after B-schools in the country. For decades, it was like the dependable elder statesman of Indian management education.  But now, XLRI wants to be anything but just another business school. In the last two decades, there has been an explosion of MBA seats across the country.  Now...

India can't get enough of surveillance technology. Indian startups, meanwhile, are making the most of this trend by securing high visibility government contracts. But while these can boost a startup's profile, government projects are unpredictable and often difficult for smaller startups to win. As a result, there is a shift underway — private clients are becoming increasingly crucial for profitab...

The golden age of the Indian shopping mall is over. There are at least 400 malls across the country. But a growing proportion of them are either dead or on life support. A report by real estate consultant firm Knight Frank found that the number of ghost malls in the country rose from 57 in 2022 to 64 in 2023. That’s about 1 in almost six malls. The report estimates that between 2022 and 2023, the...

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...

A couple years ago the biggest challenge for an organic food brand was convincing consumers that their products were worth the premium they were paying for them. It was naturally a gargantuan task, particularly in a price sensitive market like India.  But for the brands that stood their ground, believing that the Indian market would one day come around to organic eating, well, their moment has fin...

It really isn’t a great time to be a smartwatch brand in India. Pun intended. You see, the market for smartwatches in India has gone from seeing dizzying highs to depressing lows, all within the span of one year.  Just last year in September, at least 17 million people had placed orders for smartwatches across the country. Everyone seemed to want to get their hands on one. And the two brands that...

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...

This isn't your usual Daybreak Friday episode. Considering it's the end of the year, we thought we’d ask the reporters in our newsroom to talk to us about the stories they liked best. This week, we have Rounak Kumar Gunjan and Aakriti Bhalla on the show. They share two of their favourite stories — The first is a fascinating story by Rounak about how a tiny discount caused an uproar inside IRCTC or...

It has been about four months since Minutes, Flipkart's all new quick-commerce service was launched in Bangalore. But Flipkart isn’t doing e-commerce the old fashioned way. It’s not taking on the likes of Blinkit or Swiggy Instamart directly by promising speedy grocery deliveries. Instead, its big focus is electronics.  It is a space that quick-commerce giants like Blinkit, Swiggy and Zepto – have...

There’s a running joke at Hindustan Unilever's Mumbai Headquarters. If a new hire is assigned to the ice cream division, it’s immediately clear that they aren’t in the company’s inner circle. But if you’re handed Surf Excel, Brooke Brond, or Glow & Lovely, it means you are in the big leagues. Right now, that pecking order is clearer than ever. Just last month, the FMCG giant went ahead and dec...

Four years ago, India set up a new body to fix medical education. It was called the National Medical Commission (NMC) and it was meant to replace the Medical Council of India and bring reforms in this sector.  The goal, at the time, was to bring some order to the chaos.  But so far, it seems like the body has only been able to do the opposite. Between vacancies, a series of poor decision and a gen...

For the last five years, India’s new-found love for plastic has been pretty visible. More than 100 million credit cards had been issued by banks by Feb 2024. Banks, as we all know, are in a rush to sell more and more credit cards. To do this, they use a whole gamut of attractive offers.  For example, free access to airport lounges became all the rage for the longest time. The footfall at these lou...

A decade ago, when platforms like Urban Company entered the scene, they were seen the beacon of hope for thousands of women like Selvi and Nisha, two beauticians based in in Bangalore—finally, an avenue that offered them the financial independence and support their families without the cost flexibility. Now, over one third of the platform's workers are female making it the largest employer of wome...

For more than two decades, India’s jewellery industry has been dominated by one name and one name only – Tanishq. The Titan-owned brand has managed to become the go-to jewellery store for people across the country. Some may even call it the gold standard, literally.  But since last year, things have been changing. Tanishq’s dominance is being challenged. Not by some massive international player or...

Bloomberg recently published a damning report about Byju’s according to which Byju Raveendran, the edtech’s founder, allegedly tried to convince an American businessman to leave the country so he wouldn't have to testify in a federal court about the suspicious activities he saw while working for the edtech. However, William R Hailer, the businessman, filed a declaration in the US Bankruptcy Court...

In the June quarter of 2024, Honasa Consumer, the maker of Mamaearth, decided to launch this new project called Project Neev. The idea was to bring about a foundational change in the way the company operates, especially distribution. For context, Mamaearth hit the bourses in October last year when everyone else who had IPO plans had decided to hold them off for a bit. But Varun Alagh, the CEO and...

 Regular CBSE schools just don’t cut it anymore for the aspirational middle class parents in India. But considering how the annual fees at most of these schools can range anywhere between Rs 3 lakh to Rs 25 lakh, sending a child to one of them is no joke. Almost 90 per cent of parents who take the step can’t afford to pay the full fees up front. In fact, for most, even paying half the fee in one g...

The world of cyber fraud has gotten even murkier thanks to a slick new tech service that is streamlining fraud for scammers and making them even harder to track down. This new concept is called ‘Mule-as-a-service’ or MaaS. It’s kind of like a plug-and-play fraud tech where service providers are able to  deploy an army of mules on behalf of cybercriminals. These mules are people who lend their bank...

If you’ve ever taken a loan from a non bank or an NBFC, the EMI is usually auto-debited from your account every month. But if you missed a payment, you know what usually goes down. You are inundated with phone calls from your lender and maybe agents even start visiting your home. Not an ideal situation for you or your lender. But now, your lender can just monitor your account and deduct the money...

In many ways, electric vehicles today are where mobile phones were in the early 2000s.  It’s December 2002. Mobile phones have entered the market, but the average Indian is still pretty sceptical. Cell phone connections are patchy and more importantly expensive. Devices themselves were unwieldy, limited and again…expensive. Basic services like sending a text, or a voice mail, or call waiting were...