Daybreak

Google has been facing fines totalling billions of dollars for abusing its dominance not just in the Indian market but around the world. So the antitrust investigations launched against it in India last year didn't really come as a surprise for the tech giant. The Competition Commission of India found Google guilty in two antitrust cases and asked it to pay close to $300 million in fines. More tha...

More than 70% of fraudulent banking transfers in India are KYC-linked scams. A senior official at the Financial Intelligence Unit, a national agency responsible for analysing data on suspect financial transactions informed The Ken that KYC frauds amount to over Rs 900 crore ($108 million) per year. One such fraudster who spoke to us on the condition of anonymity said, "“KYC is an easy trick to pul...

On Thursday last week,  the Telecom Minister of India, Ashwini Vaishnaw, declared during a press briefing that mobile phone manufacturing worth $50 billion will take place in India in the current financial year. He also said that the total exports from the category will reach $15 billion. A significant portion of this growth has to do with what the govt did three years ago. It launched a PLI schem...

Recently, there was a study conducted by Hirepro called No résumés Please” where the firm went through 4 million CVs. They found nearly 85% of candidates were lying or exaggerating on their CVs in 2023. Employers and hiring managers are having a tough time dealing with it. Another study found that around 40% of HR professionals actually think using AI during the hiring process is a dealbreaker. An...

Foodtech giant, Swiggy, wants to raise more than $1 billion through its public offering that is scheduled for mid-2024. For this it is going by its last funding round’s valuation of nearly $ 11 billion.  But why now? Because it is watching its biggest rival Zomato’s stock price finally recover this year with back-to-back profitable quarters. Earlier this year, Swiggy CEO announced in a blog post t...

On Dec 1, 2023, Tata Consumer Products, Tata’s FMCG arm, announced a new CFO, Ashish Goenka. This hiring comes at a very interesting time because just about a month ago Tata Consumer Products or TCP approved the merger of 3 of its wholly owned subsidiaries—NourishCo Beverages, Tata SmartFoodz, and Tata Consumer Soulfull.  Lately, the company has been on quite a roll. Its been launching out a whole...

Nearly a 100 million cards are in circulation in India as of now, a 12% year-on-year rise. This rise has a lot to do with the benefits customers get: tempting cash back deals and reward points that you can collect and redeem for anything from flight tickets to staycations at luxury resorts. Cashbacks though are pretty straightforward whereas availing reward points requires a lot of effort compared...

The State Bank of India controls the biggest chunk of India's debit card market:. It also had the largest network of ATMs and CRMs (Cash Recycling Machines) spread across the country.  And ATM withdrawals make up more than 80% of annual debit transactions so SBI seems to be clearly winning.  But being the market leader of debit cards in India is actually turning out to be a problem for the public...

Tech platforms like Google, Meta, or even e-marketplaces such as Olx are increasingly becoming hotbeds of online advertising scams in India. People have been losing anything from a few thousands to even a few crore rupees to cyber crime syndicates who have  proficient, tech-savvy members. The amount of money consumers have reported losing to fraud that originated on social-media platforms has skyr...

In November 2021, *Paytm’s parent company One97 Communications went public with a $2.4 billion IPO. What followed was a bloodbath for the fintech giant. In a span of a year after the IPO, Paytm’s stock lost 75% of its market value. No other large IPO in the last decade had seen such a bad fall in stock value within the first year of listing. But last year, in a dramatic turnaround, Paytm saw its s...

On Monday, Physics Wallah fired over 100 of its employees and also announced it was going to hire more than a thousand more in the coming months. India's only profitable edtech unicorn is on a relentless expansion spree. So much so that its investors want it to slow down. From establishing itself as the leader of NEET-JEE test preparation, Physics Wallah (PW) wants to dip its toes in a bunch of ot...

Varun Alagh, the CEO and co-founder the skincare company, Mamaearth, likes to think of his brand as an outlier. Just a day after Mamaearth’s parent company went public, on October 31, Alagh told The Economic Times that the company’s IPO was not going to meet the same fate as other new-age startups in the recent past.  The public market has been quite hostile lately and investors are especially ste...

More than 160 million people in five states will be deciding their political future this month in India. Out of them, two states, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, are set to go to poll today.  In any democracy, the run up to the elections is a very sensitive period where misinformation can spread like wildfire. Take what happened recently in Madhya Pradesh for example. A video of the BJP CM Shivra...

PVR INOX posted a blockbuster quarter with triple the revenue from a year ago. Nearly 50 million Indians flocked PVR INOX theaters in the September quarter. A huge part of it is of course thanks to this year's big releases like Barbie, Oppenheimer, Gadar 2, and not to forget, the record-breaking performance of Shahrukh Khan’s Jawan. Just last Sunday, Salman Khan’s much-awaited Diwali release Tiger...

Since last year, the edtech giant is facing the wrath of a group of creditors who had given it a $1.2 billion loan. They wanted it to immediately repay part of the loan. On Friday, a Delaware judge in the US concluded that the lenders had properly cited the default on loan when taking over control of a unit of Byju’s. Basically Byju’s lost the case.  What could’ve triggered this lack of confidence...

Last Friday Apple reported the sixth straight record quarterly revenue from iPhone sales in India. Its FY2023 revenue from the country now stands at almost $6 billion. In fact, analysts say that by the end of this year, especially with the festive season around, it is very close to hitting $10 billion. Apple’s share in India’s smartphone market is now estimated to have touched 6%. CEO Tim Cook whi...

It has taken Swiggy almost ten years and a whole lot of strategically planned moves to become the indispensable app that it is for us today. But decisive moment for the delivery giant came three years ago in 2020 with the pandemic. Swiggy’s core food delivery business took quite the hit . It had no choice but to adapt quickly and branch out. It decided to build on its delivery experience and launc...

If you’ve been watching the ICC Cricket World Cup, youve definitely seen the PhonePe one too many times. The payments giant paid Rs 150 crore to get these advertising rights. It is the biggest UPI payments company in the country with a 49% of the market share.   But why is a payments giant selling insurance and why health insurance to be specific? You see, as big as the PhonePe might be, and even...

Yesterday, November 2, 2023, was the final day of Mamaearth-parent Honasa Consumer's IPO. The digital-first D2C sailed through with the price band fixed at Rs 308-324 per share. With this, Mamaearth has become the first digital-first D2C company to take the public route. It is also the first unicorn company to do so it the last 18 months. From 2020 to 2022, Honasa saw its revenues double every yea...

Vivo, the Chinese smartphone maker, was in the news earlier this month for arrests of its associates after it faced ED raids last year. Despite this, Vivo became no.1  in India’s smartphone market, even ahead of Samsung and Xiaomi in the quarter ended June. What’s more, unlike Xiaomi, which saw a sharp decline in its market share after raids in 2021, Vivo is still going strong. But it can’t celebr...

The introduction of the contraceptive pill in the 1960s was one of the most significant events in the history of human society. It still left the burden of birth control largely on women. Now, however, things are changing. The demand for male contraceptives is on the rise. Last week, in a major breakthrough, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) finished clinical trials for the world's fir...

Delivery partners who work for Swiggy or Zomato are paid per order. The fee which includes variables like base fee, surcharge, etc, depends on how many kilometres they’ve travelled from pickup to delivery destination. These payments though, are never consistent and gig workers, who make our lives so convenient, struggle with earning a stable income.  So when Zomato says on their bill under the del...

According to latest numbers, Ola Electric, the leader of two-wheeler EVs in India, is losing market share—from 40 per cent in July to just 29 per cent in September. Bajaj Auto, meanwhile, has gained the most market share. It started with just a 4% share in April and now it has gone up to 11%.  Ola Electric maybe doing much better with more than 250,000 scooters sold so far but the discontent regar...

Two days ago, on Tuesday, India’s most famous edtech was in the news again. Byju’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ajay Goyal quit the edtech barely  6 months after joining. It had taken Byju’s 16 months to find Goyal after its previous CFO PV Rao quit in December 2021 . Goyal was hired only in April this year and had a tough task cut out for him: to help improve the company’s financial compliance i...

On October 14, a Saturday, Disney Hotstar set a world record: it saw the highest number of simultaneous viewers tune in for any format of cricket ever. The ICC World Cup match between India and Pakistan was streaming and it drew in 35 million viewers. A week later, on Sunday, it broke that record too with the India-New Zealand match when 43 million viewers tuned in. The timing of this couldn't be...