Daybreak

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 other areas—from banking and defence to civil services now. Not to forget short-term skilling courses and even tie-ups with schools.

Despite this hyper growth phase coming after PW became the only profitable edtech unicorn in the last financial year, cracks are appearing on its armour now.

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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. 

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 steering clear of digital companies and startups. But despite this Mamaearth went ahead with its plan and became the first D2C brand to go public. Unfortunately though, its shares have been falling ever since.

What happened to Mamaearth is not isolated. It is the beginning of the end of the D2C gold rush.

Tune in to hear all about it.

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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 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 Shivraj Singh Chauhan went viral where he can be heard saying that his party will lose the election this time because people are really angry with the BJP. Turns out, it was a fake video. Just imagine the potential of such fake content going viral with AI and deep fakes. It is a scary thought.

So what is the government latest stance on dispelling fake news and misinformation especially during election time?

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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.

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 3 also hit the big screen. 

However, even though PVR INOX successfully crossed pre-pandemic revenues in the September quarter, there was one very important metric that it failed turn around: occupancy levels. So to solve the issue, it came up with a first-of-its-kind subscription plan called Passport. It allows movie-goers to watch 10 movies a month for Rs 699 only.

But it turned out too good to be true. 

"Terms and conditions apply."

Tune in to find out more.

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.

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 amongst the creditors of the Edtech giant?

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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.

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 while speaking about Apple's performance called the Indian market extraordinary.

But for over a decade since it launched in India, Apple's growth was sluggish to the point of being stagnant.

What brought about this turnaround?

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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.

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 launched Instamart for groceries and Swiggy Genie for intra-city couriers.

The company is now valued at just under $8 billion dollars and has seen its revenue double to almost $600 million in the year ended March 2022. Putting itself on the fast lane to growth while delivering  convenience to the urban consumer has really worked out for the company. Or at least so it seems.

Because in doing all of this, Swiggy might have forgotten the most important part of the equation- its 350,000 delivery partners.

Tune in.

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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.

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 with a giant like Walmart behind it, profit margins in the the payments business are pretty slim. And with a possible IPO in the works, PhonePe had no choice but to diversify and so it did.

It launched its insurance vertical in 2020. However, three years have passed now and PhonePe’s insurance business has contributed just 1% to the company’s consolidated revenue for FY2023.

And yet PhonePe continues to pour money into it, mainly on health insurance part. Is it a conscious choice or is it because it has no choice?

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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.

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 and in 2022 it also became profitable. Compared to other established beauty and personal care brands, it also stands out because of how "aggressively" it has been launching new products or SKUs. This year, it's already shown a 25 crore rupees profit. If we go by these metrics alone, things looked quite promising for Mamaearth.

But its public issue was oversubscribed by 7.61X on the last day. And this was only because of the huge demand from qualified institutional buyers (QIBs).

Retail buyers seemed quite uninterested in Mamaearth's IPO. 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.

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 celebrate the victory just yet. Why?

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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.