Daybreak

Earlier this week, India’s biggest winemaker, Sula, saw its share price reach historic high. The winemaker controls more than half of the market share of India's domestic wine industry. 

When it went for an IPO at the end of  2022, it was successfully subscribed by almost two and a half times.

So you might think the jump in the share price makes sense. Afterall, Sula dominates the wine market in India. But you see, India is not a wine drinking country in general. The share of wine in the country's total alcohol consumption is minuscule.

Turns out, the global brokerage CLSA saying Sula could rise 50% in the next year sent its shares soaring. But this was not because Sula Indians suddenly have become wine drinkers or because Sula has entered the new market.

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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.   

Paytm*, the fintech giant that was last valued at $16 billion would've never been able to get where it is now without its field agents. Field agents are to fintech payments companies, what delivery partners are to Zomato, Swiggy: their backbone.

Out of the 70,000 odd fintech field agents in India, Paytm has about 35000 of these  all around the country. The fintech giant boasts of nearly 40 million registered offline merchants now thanks to the work of its agents.

But things are changing now. It's become very challenging for them to onboard new merchants, especially in urban areas, where there are barely any businesses left to tap. As for rural areas, which have a bigger share of untapped merchants, fintechs think its too expensive. Plus the growing competition amongst fintechs has made merchant loyalty difficult to maintain.

The market has become saturated and of course, who could be feeling the most pressure but these agents.

But what do fintechs expect them to do?

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(*Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in The Ken)

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.   

2023 turned out to be a landmark year for UPI (Unified Payments Interface) with the number of transactions crossing the 100-billion mark for the first time, according to the latest data released by the NPCI. The month of December alone saw more than 12 billion transactions. These numbers are testament to how UPI has revolutionized the way we use money. 

As of now, there are more than 300 million users in India are using UPI to freely carry out their financial transactions with each other.  

But did you know that your bank can block your account without a warning or any explanation based on your UPI transactions? And what's worst, you could even come under the radar of law enforcement authorities like the cyber crime police. Anyone who unknowingly makes a transaction, directly or indirectly, with a fraudster can be considered suspicious by authorities.  

Meanwhile, banks and law enforcement agencies still haven't managed to figure out a standard operating procedure in dealing with such matters. This had led them to adopt a ‘block first, ask questions later’ approach that's been making the lives of innocent victims of financial crimes even harder. 

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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.   

Ever since it started, Rapido, the bike taxi company has consciously stayed away from venturing into the cab business. It was happy to stay in the bike taxi lane and beat Ola and Uber there even though that it managed to do it at the expense of customer safety.

Now, though, eight years later, Rapido has finally launched its own cab hailing service. Over the last six months or so, it ran a pilot project in Hyderabad and ended up with almost a 25% share of the city’s cab hailing market so last month, it decided to launch in two more cities, New Delhi and Bangalore.

What makes it different from Ola and Uber is that instead of commissions, it wants its driver partners to pay a subscription. Right now, Rapido only charges a subscription fee in Hyderabad, and drivers in the other two cities can use the platform for free for another few months. 

The idea is to disrupt the market by making it a more economic deal for cab drivers whose earnings from Ola and Uber have been on a free fall since the last few years.

But disruption comes at a cost.

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Also listen to: Is Rapido trading passenger safety for growth?

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

In 2023, more than 70 million new users downloaded the online shopping app Myntra. India’s leading fashion e-retailer owned by Flipkart has been on quite the discount giving spree lately. And we are not just talking about the year end and festive discounts. Since July, Myntra has 22 sales days every month. Its biggest rival, Reliance owned Ajio has no more than 14.

So you might think, Myntra must be raking in some crazy numbers in sales right?

Not quite.

From onboarding hundreds of sellers a month to regular strategic changes, Myntra is trying it all. And its sales growth is still slumping. A former business executive told The Ken, “the past 15 months have been bad for Myntra.” In fact, Myntra’s net loss jumped over 30% in the financial year ended March 31, 2023. It posted a net loss of nearly 800 crore rupees.

What is going on?

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Listen to Anant Narayan talking about his stint as Myntra's CEO and more on First Principles here

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

For the last week of December, we are taking you back to some of the most popular Daybreak episodes of 2023. We'll be back with regular programming from January 3, 2024.

For a people who were quite averse to the whole concept of credit, Indians really seem to be developing a new found love for the piece of plastic and banks have been happy to ride the wave.

But lately they’ve been left quite baffled because they are being being beaten at their own game. A growing community of people are constantly finding hacks to take advantage of the loopholes in credit-card reward systems. For some of them , in fact, it’s going so well that they’ve turned their secret operations into lucrative businesses. Turns out they can make more money from it than their 9 to 5 jobs.

Meanwhile banks have realised they are being taken for a ride so some have taken extra security measures to keep such tricksters at bay.

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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, analytical business stories.

For the last week of December, we are taking you back to some of the most popular Daybreak episodes of 2023. We'll be back with regular programming from January 3, 2024.

For the longest time public sector banks, as we know them, have been very reluctant about study abroad loans. And it was for good reason. They’ve suffered greatly because of education loans going bad.

Meanwhile, its a whole different story that was going on with non-banks. Study abroad loans accounted for about US$4 billion in the year ended March 2023. These were almost fully funded by non-banks like Credila and Avanse Financial. Their staregy was simple—sanction collateral-free as fast as possible. Over time they gained experience and most importantly, years worth of data.

Guess who is using all that data and experience gathered by non-banks to offer overseas education loans now?

The banks!

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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.

More than a year after the communication minister Ashwini Vaishnav had introduced a the draft version to the public, on Thursday, the Rajya Sabha passed the new Telecom Bill. Many hopes were pinned on it considering it was meant to replace the three archaic laws that had been governing India’s telecom sector.

The journey until here, however, was far from smooth. The draft version of the bill had left the industry divided and it actually received a record 900 comments. After many revisions, the bill has been passed. And while it enables structural changes that will empower telecom users and simplify complicated processes such as licensing, it also raises a some serious concerns.

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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.

Two years ago, Sony’s India unit, Sony Pictures Networks, announced a merger with rival Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd. It was supposed to be the country’s biggest entertainment deal.  The combined entity would own more than 70 TV channels, two video streaming services and two film studios. Ever since, Sony Liv’s subscriber base grew from 18 million to over 33 million.

With good original stories and unique non-fiction shows, alongside a strong partnerships strategy, Sony has been able to close the gap on market leaders such as Hotstar. Zee meanwhile has a formidable arsenal of regional content.

The combined strengths of the two platforms, Sony and Zee, could turn out to be a serious threat to other OTT giants. But much to their relief, as temporary as it maybe, the merger may not happen after all. Because Sony it is yet to agree to Zee’s 21st Dec merger deadline extension request.

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Also in this episode: X's EU troubles continue 

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.

A few days ago Karthik Ayyar, the founder of an IIT Madras-incubated company that developed India’s first indigenous mobile operating system, BharOS, said his company is considering providing this technology for routers. BharOS is being launched as an alternative at a time when the tech giants like Google are under the scanner for anti-trust practices in India.

However, this is not the first time India is trying to develop an indigenous operating system, both for mobile and computer devices.

The failure of the OS projects in the past may hold some important lessons for anyone making a future attempt.

Tune in for the details.

Also in this episode: Jeff Bezos’ dream for the future of humanity.

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.