Daybreak

Last month, India’s second largest automaker – Hyundai –  went public. But this was not your run of the mill IPO. This was widely speculated to be the largest public listing ever seen in the Indian stock market. So there was naturally a lot of hype around it. 

But on October 17, just hours before Hyundai’s public issue was set to close, most stock market circles across the country were stumped. There was a growing sense of disbelief. Panic even. Because only half of the nearly Rs 28,000 crore offer had been subscribed until then. This was a far cry from the 90 per cent threshold that had to be crossed. 

The IPO eventually had a pretty listless listing on October 22. Despite all that hype. 

Now naturally, that left a lot of people wondering what could have gone wrong? What prompted so many retail investors to keep away from the Hyundai IPO? 

Well, a lot of it had to do with what transpired in Rajkot in the run-up to issue. This isn’t just about Hyundai. This small city in Gujarat has a big role to play in India’s IPO market.

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We are hosting our first live recording! If you are in your 20s, like to run or just enjoy meeting new people, sign up for The Ken X 56 Run Club. This is for our Bengaluru-based listeners only. 

A new generation of designers is on the rise. These designers are expected to be  a lot more than just “one trick ponies”. The new-age ‘Designer X’ is expected to bring  a little bit of everything to the table. They understand the basics of sustainability, how their designs would impact things like climate change and culture. And they would also generally know a little bit of coding too. 

And that is because the whole perception of design has shifted. Just last month, IIT Delhi announced a new certificate course in design thinking. It quoted multiple reports explaining why aspirants should take it. One of them was a 2023 Deloitte report that said companies that integrated design thinking in their innovation process brought new products to market 50 per cent faster than others and saw 2.5 X more revenue growth.

The latest batch of design generalists are the products of a new era of design education that has been sweeping through India’s universities. As of now, about a dozen have started their own design schools. Some of these universities are leaning into the industry’s demand for a well-rounded designer.

But now that more universities have entered the picture and generalist designers are becoming a dime a dozen, landing good jobs is going to get tougher as the job market matures. 

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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

*This episode was originally published on July 12, 2024

Have you ever heard of a 'f*** off fund'? Or better yet, do you have one?

For the uninitiated, it is a sum of money that women should ideally set aside to get out of a difficult situation – think toxic job, abusive relationship or family situation, you get the drift. 

The term was coined by freelance writer, Paulette Perhach, in 2016. We recommend that you read her powerful essay on financial independence. The idea is for it to give you enough power, confidence and control to literally be able to say “f*** off” and walk away. 

You are probably thinking, ‘great in theory, but how do I actually build one for myself?’. We have got you covered. In this special episode of Daybreak, Chaitra Chidanand, the co-founder of Salt, a financial services platform for women, demystifies f*** off funds and how you can get one. 

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Suggested reading

A F*** Off Fund: the most important female prep, Reddit

"The FOF has saved me and my kids a few times.  Health crisis. Unemployment. Violence.  S**t happens.  But just as important—having a FOF means you can act from a position of power, not fear, not subservience."

Warren Buffett Invests Like A Girl? Forbes

"Buffett has always said that it’s temperament--not intellect--that makes you a great long-term investor. When you look at studies that have been coming out in the last 10 years about how men and women invest, what you see is that women tend to naturally have this temperament that creates long-term investing success."

For Women With Money Issues, an A.D.H.D. Diagnosis Can Be Revelatory, NYT

'But because activities like planning or budgeting don’t usually give people with A.D.H.D. a dopamine hit, they can find it harder than neurotypical people to get started or stick to accounting activities. This results in extra costs — paying cancellation fees for missed appointments or late fees for not opening a bill on time, or losing refunds because we missed the deadline for returning an unwanted purchase.'

For feedback, write to us at [email protected]

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In the 2024 financial year, Apple sold products worth $8 billion in India. This was a third more than the previous year.

But how did a premium company like Apple that hates giving discounts sell products worth 8 billion dollars in a country as price sensitive as India? Apple obviously knew that its phones were unaffordable for most people in India?

It found an answer was easy financing. After the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, Apple made financing tie-ups with banks a mainstay. And one of the most important deals Apple made was with India’s largest private sector lender, and leading credit card issuer HDFC Bank. In fact, it was one of the costliest deals HDFC had. Thanks to it, HDFC customers have been enjoying exclusive cashbacks on Apple products ever since.
Here’s the bad news. The deal between Apple and HDFC is now over.

What happened?

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For a whole decade, Ola and Uber dominated the cab-hailing market. But cut to 2024 and that scenario is shifting. Both these companies are drifting. And a third contender – Rapido – is making the most of it. 

Both homegrown Ola and US-based Uber are dealing with a unique set of problems. The whole ride-hailing business seems to have taken a backseat for Ola, which is now knee deep in the electric vehicles business. Meanwhile, for Uber, the problem is stagnation. 

And those factors combined have taken a toll on their combined marketshare. The big two’s combined dominance has come down to around 60-70 per cent from over 90 per cent three years ago. 

But there’s a huge opportunity here for nine-year-old Rapido. Which the cab aggregation newbie is making the most of. 

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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Welcome to the world of luxury-lifestyle management, where firms like RedBeryl, Indulge Global, and Quintessentially play the role of concierge for their ultra-wealthy clients, making the impossible possible.

Now this sort of thing has become even easier for the rich. Because their wealth managers are also taking care of some of these requests. 

It isn’t a one -off thing. Companies like RedBeryl, Indulge GLobal, Quintessential – all of which play the role of concierge for their ultra wealthy clients – are increasingly partnering with wealth managers to edge out competition and increase their clientele. 

In today’s episode, we dive into how wealth managers are finding new ways to delight the ultra-rich. 

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Zomato planning to raise 8,500 crore rupees again. This comes just three years after its grand IPO where it had raised almost the same amount. The company's stock prices have doubled in the last ten months. 

Interestingly, this fundraise is going to be through a qualified investment placement or QIP when a listed company raises capital from domestic markets without the need to submit any pre-issue filings to market regulators. Only qualified institutional investors are allowed to participate in this kind of a fundraise. All this just as rival Swiggy is prepping for its IPO. And the quick-commerce trio—Blinkit, Instamart, and Zepto are gearing up to expand beyond the metros and into smaller cities. Plus new, deep-pocketed companies like Reliance Retail and Flipkart are also joining into the race. In a letter to shareholders, founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal wrote that the fundraise is intended to ensure a “level playing field with competitors who continue to raise additional capital” and to “strengthen its balance sheet”. There was no mention of how the funds would be used.

At first, this seems like Zomato declaring war in the quick-commerce space. Some analysts believe it could be a move to show the market that it has a balance sheet that is the “strongest of all.

But is that all there is to it?

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

If all the women of the world had a collective wallet where we could put in a penny for every time we heard the words “your biological clock is ticking,” we could move to Venus and run our own planet.

But as unfair as it may be, it is true. There is an ideal time period in a woman’s life when she can have a baby. Or when she is the most “fertile.”

Unlike men who are biologically not limited by such constraints, women are born with a limited number of eggs. And turns out, this number of eggs sees a drastic decline after the age of 37. And when we say drastic, we mean drastic.

But in the 1980s, scientists figured out how to freeze women's eggs. They developed a process called oocyte cryopreservation. It took thirty years for the procedure to become widely available. Today, a growing number of women are opting for the procedure. 

Most people assume that women freeze their eggs so they can buy time to achieve professional success. Women who freeze their eggs are often envisioned as 'career-driven', 'power hungry', and ambitious. But, egg freezing is an intense process. It is invasive, it is painful. It takes a toll on women not just physically but mentally as well. Plus, it is expensive.

So why do women freeze their eggs?

Hosts Snigdha and Rahel went to Dr Marcia Inhorn, a professor at the University of Yale and author of Motherhood on Ice to find out.

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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

For a country that boasts of its digital public goods infrastructure like Aadhar and UPI, it is a wonder why telecom has been so ignored. After nearly 1500 crore rupees of was reportedly lost to digital fraud in the financial year 2024, the govt’s Trai is finally scrambling to catch up with CPAN or the Calling Name Presentation (CNAP) service, its own version of Truecaller. 

Truecaller, the Swedish call-screening company, meanwhile, has been holding the fort for a while now. Users count on it to save them from spam and fraud calls.  While TrueCaller maybe looking like a hero in this situation, it is a private company after all. It is using this opportunity to make money from both users and businesses.

But its success in India is also built partially on how inadequate privacy laws are in India. The company has been accused of breaching data privacy norms in the past. 

Can TRAI replace Truecaller? 

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(This episode was first published in July, 2024)

DAYBREAK UNWIND RECOMMENDATIONS for "coming of age"

Rahel: Big Mouth, Netflix
Snigdha: The Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro and Lady Bird (2017)
Atish Deore: The works of PL Deshpande, a Marathi author and playwright
Shubhangi: Derry Girls (2018)
Brijesh: Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens   

Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. For next Thursday's Unwind, send us your recommendations to us as texts or voice notes. The theme is "favourite translated books."              

Late last month, the Supreme Court made a very strong statement about NRI quotas at medical colleges. It essentially said that the whole thing was a fraud. 

But the thing is, since the Supreme Court called it out, the practice has only gotten murkier. So The Ken reporter Alifiya Khan conducted an investigation. She scoured several social networking sites only to find countless posts promising seats in medical institutes to aspirants who scored way  below the required cutoff and even those who were hardly eligible for the NRI quota. 

The only requirement? Well, applicants need to be ready to cough up some big bucks. The Ken wanted to see if there was something to these claims. So Alifiya went undercover. She posed as the sibling of a Maharashtra-based MBBS aspirant, with a measly NEET score of 180. She then contacted four education consultancies. And all of them, quite unsurprisingly, had boilerplate replies. The running thread – regardless of your score, they would hook you up with a medical college. 

And yet, most people high up in medical colleges don’t want to let go of NRI quota. Because in many ways it is what keeps the whole system afloat. What’s going on? 

Stay tuned.