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 than half of this penalty was for exploiting its dominant position in the market for Android, which happens to power 97% of smartphones in India. 

Google did manage to get a breather in June this year when the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) quashed some key directives from the CCI. Google then approached the Supreme Court of India for the second time asking for all of CCI's directives to be withdrawn. While the case is still ongoing, Google lost a major anti-trust case in the US on Monday against Fortnite creator, Epic Games.

Experts believe this could the outcome of the anti-trust investigation in India.

Tune in.

P.S New Segment on Epic vs Google starts at 8:17.

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 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 pull off. People have heard about banks freezing accounts due to non-compliance with KYC norms. So they get convinced, particularly those in smaller towns and cities.” In a span four years, this fraudster's gang has stolen nearly Rs 50 lakh.

But the whole point of banks carrying out the elaborate KYC process is to protect their customers from fraud. How is then that this very process accounts for nearly two-thirds of fraudulent banking transfers in India?

Tune in.

P.S Look out for our brand new segment in which we talk about Grok, Elon Musk's very own problem child.

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.

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 scheme that aimed to make India the hub of mobile phone manufacturing. The idea was to boost large-scale manufacturing and to support domestic phone makers to become globally competitive.

But of the six companies that made the cut to claim the scheme’s incentives, only two are Indian.

Why is “Make in India” attracting more foreign phone makers than Indian ones?

Also, there's a surprise for you at the end of the episode.

Tune in!

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.

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. And turns out, it's not very hard for recruiters to tell the difference between a CV written by the applicant and an AI-generated one.

Should you stop using AI tools to write your CV then?

Tune in.

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.

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 that Swiggy’s food delivery business has finally turned profitable after 9 years of its inception. And by March next year, the company as a whole aims to become profitable. 

But the company suffered losses with more than $ 500 million in FY 2023.

How does it plan to become profitable by March 2024?

Tune in to find out.

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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.

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 bunch of new products by the dozens. And most importantly, its financials are looking quite good. In the September quarter, it reported a net profit of more than 350 crore rupees.

But for the longest time, despite being a giant steel-to-software conglomerate, Tata’s consumer goods game was nowhere close to India's top FMCG companies. In fact, before 2019, it more or less stuck to selling just the essentials.

But now its shares have more than tripled. How is the company managing things at this speed? 

Tune in to find out.

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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.

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 to cashbacks. And between the two, there’s one that banks actually don’t like.

Tune in to find out.

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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.

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 lender. Debit cards might be ahead of credit cards in terms of circulation but they are dying a slow death in the Indian market. In fact, a lot of industry experts agree that debit cards, in their current physical form, may actually become obsolete in the coming decade. 

So by being the biggest player in this market that is fading away, SBI is also taking the largest beating from its decline. But instead of cutting its losses, SBI is still doggedly trying to save this dying product. 

Why?

Tune in to find out.

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.

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 skyrocketed since 2017. Last year alone, people reported losing more than $1.2 billion to fraud that started on social media.

What are big techs like Google and Meta doing to prevent these crimes? Is it enough?

Tune in to find out.

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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.

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 stock value go up by 90%. What could've Paytm possibly done to bring about this crazy turnaround?

It was personal loans. They’re the reason Paytm saw a more than 60%  jump in  revenue in the year ended March 2023. But now, Paytm can't rely on it anymore.

Tune in to find out why.

*Paytm’s 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, analytical business stories.