Arvind's Newsletter

1.American prosecutors have indicted Gautam Adani, India’s second-richest, along with his nephew, Sagar Adani, and several others, on charges of “conspiracies to commit securities and wire fraud”.

The Adani Group dismissed allegations by US prosecutors that its billionaire founder Gautam Adani participated in an $250 million bribery scheme, an indictment that threw the sprawling business conglomerate back into turmoil.

Shares in flagship Adani Enterprises fell more than 20%, while an Adani unit scrapped a $600 million dollar bond sale. The charges, which the company said were baseless, came just as the company appeared to be regaining the market’s confidence following last year’s sell-off  which was triggered by a report by Hindenburg Research accusing the company of fraud and stock manipulation. 

Adani’s net worth sank more than $15 bn earlier on Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.  GQG Partners, which took a contrarian bet on the company after the Hindenburg attack with an investment that’s ballooned to $10 billion, said it’s monitoring the charges. 

However, worth asking whether Donald Trump, America’s president-elect, who is on good terms with Mr Modi and who loathes his own justice department, might make the Adanis’ problems go away. But such an arrangement is unlikely to be cost-free for India. 

The group called off a planned $600m bond issue as news of the indictment broke. A tougher financing environment could put a brakes on its ambitions. 

Also, Kenya's president said he has cancelled multimillion-dollar airport expansion and energy deals withI ndian tycoon Gautam Adani after US bribery and fraud indictments.

Even assuming all the charges against Adani are entirely without merit, the silence of India’s regulators is worrying for investors who rely on them to ensure a clean market. 

2.4.8 mn weddings boost business for jewellery, apparel, auto, and hotels

This is the total number of couples expected to tie the knot in CY2023, representing a 26.3% increase from the 38 lakh weddings recorded in the previous year. This wedding season is expected to revitalise sectors such as jewellery, apparel, hotels, and even automobiles, turning a potentially sluggish year into one of strong recovery, according to Business Standard.

Industry experts report a 20% increase in wedding-related demand compared to last year, with the momentum expected to continue. In southern India, the surge is particularly evident in designer saree sales, where a 22-25% rise is anticipated.

3.PE players and VC companies adjust to longer holds after public listing

While IPOs remain a favoured exit strategy, many funds are now reconsidering their approach to gauge post-listing gains. 

Anuj Bhargava of Lightspeed Venture Partners told Business Standard that the increasing popularity of IPOs as a lucrative exit strategy for PE and VC firms in India, noting that out of $55 billion in equity activity this year, $14.5 billion is through IPOs and $23 billion is secondary. Despite this trend, recent reports indicate that IPO-based exits have actually replaced secondary deals as the primary exit method for PE/VC investors in 2023.

4.AI can now create a replica of your personality

Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning accuracy.

That’s now possible according to a new paper from a team including researchers from Stanford and Google DeepMind.

They recruited 1,000 people and, from interviews with them, created agent replicas of them all. To test how well the agents mimicked their human counterparts, participants did a series of tests, games and surveys, then the agents completed the same exercises. The results were 85% similar.

5.The US government wants to force Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

A federal judge ruled in August that the tech giant holds an illegal monopoly over internet search, and the Department of Justice is seeking to break it up. The sale could be worth up to $20 bn, marking Washington’s “most aggressive effort to rein in a technology company” since an unsuccessful attempt to break up Microsoft in 2004, Bloomberg said.

Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, and defaults to using Google for search — key for the company’s lucrative ad business, allowing it to see signed-in users’ activity and target promotions.

Whether Trump will keep pushing it through is unclear, though.

6.New data shows the number of new mobile internet users is stalling

When Facebook hit 1 billion users in 2012, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that when it comes to getting another billion users, “The big thing is obviously going to be mobile.” In an interview at the time, Zuckerberg told Bloomberg, “As more phones become smartphones, it’s just this massive opportunity.”

Clearly, he was correct. A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population. 

Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing.

7.Chip goliath Nvidia reported surging sales and doubled profits thanks to a boom in artificial intelligence spending.

In particular, the company said its next-generation Blackwell chips were already so popular that sales would be constrained by supply, rather than demand.

The latest results cement an astonishing rise in Nvidia’s fortunes, thanks in large part to AI: Its market capitalisation has increased just this year by more than the entire value of Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

Still, its stock fell, with investors disappointed by the bumper figures. The Information likened Nvidia shareholders to “spoiled children,” while CNBC said the company was a victim of the “hedonic treadmill,”in which people’s expectations rise alongside any success, necessitating ever-growing improvements.

8.Diabetes rates have doubled worldwide in the last 30 years.

New research found that diabetes diagnoses went up from 7% globally in 1990 to 14% in 2022, driven by a surge in the developing world: India had more than a quarter of the 828 million diabetics.

The spread suggests that people are living longer, as the disease is associated with too much food rather than too little. But nearly 60% of diabetics over 30 — nearly 450 million people — lack access to medication, the Financial Times reported, despite the availability of cheap off-patent generic drugs.

Supply chain issues and the patchiness of pharmaceutical companies’ access schemes leave many countries unable to obtain them. “We were facing a global diabetes crisis.” one campaigner said.