Arvind's Newsletter

1.Maruti Suzuki Clocks Record Sales In FY25 Amid Muted India Sales, Surging Exports

Sales of Maruti Suzuki India Ltd. rose to a record high in fiscal 2025, but that masked muted demand at home amid surge in exports.

Total sales of India's largest carmaker rose 4.63% to 22,34,266 units in the fiscal ended March 31, 2025, as against 21,35,323 units in FY24, according to an exchange filing. That includes highest ever annual domestic sales of 1,795,259 units and highest ever annual exports of 3,32,585 units.

Meanwhile,Toyota Kirloskar Motor also reported its highest ever sales in a financial year 2024-25 driven by robust demand for both SUVs and multi-purpose vehicles.

The company said it dispatched 3,37,148 units to dealers last fiscal year, a growth of 28 per cent as compared with 2,63,512 units in FY24.

In other Automobile news, the plot thickened as Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker BYD has refuted claims suggesting it intends to establish a manufacturing plant in India, according to a report by TechinAsia.com. The company dismissed the reports as “untrue” in an official statement posted on its WeChat account. Lets see how this news further develops.

2.Apple strengthens manufacturing in India

Foxconn intends to produce 25-30 million Apple iPhones at its Indian facilities this year, which would be an over twofold increase over last years’ output.

Foxconn is developing a 300-acre facility in Bengaluru, set to become its second-largest after China. Additionally, the company has established a new unit in Hyderabad for AirPods production, expanding Apple's product range in India. These complement their substantial iPhone assembly operations at the Sriperumbudur campus near Chennai.

3.India's defence exports surge to record Rs 23,622 crore in 2024-25

India's defence exports have surged to a record high of Rs 23,622 crore (approx. $2.76 billion) in 2024-25 registering a 12.04 per cent growth over the previous fiscal, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said on Tuesday.

Singh also said that the country is poised to achieve the target of Rs 50,000 crore in defence exports by 2029. India's defence exports in 2023-24 were Rs 21,083 crore.

The Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSUs) have shown a significant increase of 42.85 per cent in their exports in 2024-25 and now account for 35.5% of total exports.

4.BHIM 3.0 launched with special features like expense tracking, enhanced security; check how it will work

The Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) app has been upgraded to version 3.0, bringing new features designed to enhance the user experience and streamline financial management. This update aims to improve the functionality of the app, particularly in tracking and splitting expenses among users, which is intended to simplify managing digital transactions.

5.Alzheimer's Blood Test

Researchers have developed a blood test that diagnoses Alzheimer's disease and measures its progression with 92% accuracy. The breakthrough offers a potential tool to accurately diagnose the disease while tailoring treatments to an individual's specific disease stage.

Unlike existing blood tests that only aid in diagnosis, the new test can distinguish between early- and late-stage Alzheimer's and differentiate it from other causes of cognitive impairment. The test identifies levels of MTBR-tau243, a protein that indicates toxic tau accumulation in the brain, correlating with Alzheimer's severity. Researchers found patients with non-Alzheimer's cognitive impairment showed normal levels of the protein, while patients with mild cognitive symptoms from Alzheimer's showed elevated tau protein levels, and those in the dementia phase showed levels up to 200 times higher. 

6.AI Discovers New Uses for old Drugs

The NYTimes has an excellent piece by Kate Morgan on AI discovering new uses for old drugs.

“A little over a year ago, Joseph Coates was told there was only one thing left to decide. Did he want to die at home, or in the hospital?

Coates, then 37 and living in Renton, Wash., was barely conscious. For months, he had been battling a rare blood disorder called POEMS syndrome, which had left him with numb hands and feet, an enlarged heart and failing kidneys. Every few days, doctors needed to drain liters of fluid from his abdomen. He became too sick to receive a stem cell transplant — one of the only treatments that could have put him into remission.

“I gave up,” he said. “I just thought the end was inevitable.”

But Coates’s girlfriend, Tara Theobald, wasn’t ready to quit. So she sent an email begging for help to a doctor in Philadelphia named David Fajgenbaum, whom the couple met a year earlier at a rare disease summit.

By the next morning, Dr. Fajgenbaum had replied, suggesting an unconventional combination of chemotherapy, immunotherapy and steroids previously untested as a treatment for Coates’s disorder.

Within a week, Coates was responding to treatment. In four months, he was healthy enough for a stem cell transplant. Today, he’s in remission.

The lifesaving drug regimen wasn’t thought up by the doctor, or any person. It had been spit out by an artificial intelligence model.”

7.OpenAI has closed one of the largest private funding rounds in history

OpenAI has raised $40bn (£31bn) through fundraising led by the Japanese group SoftBank, in a deal that values the ChatGPT developer at $300bn.

OpenAI said the funding round would allow the company to “push the frontiers of AI research even further”. It added that SoftBank’s support would “pave the way” towards AGI, or artificial general intelligence, the term for AI systems that can match or exceed humans at nearly all cognitive tasks.

8.The British government will make the Netflix drama Adolescence available to be shown in high schools. 

“The smash hit Netflix drama — which has already provoked widespread debate for tackling the subjects of knife crime, toxic masculinity and the danger of online content on children — will now be made available alongside guides and resources for teachers, parents and carers to help them navigate the conversations that are raised." Adolescence’ Available to Stream in All U.K. Secondary Schools in Initiative backed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

9.The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine

“In the early days after Russia’s armies crossed into Ukraine, two Ukrainian generals journeyed from Kyiv under diplomatic cover on a secret mission. At the U.S. military garrison in Wiesbaden, Germany, they sealed a partnership that would bring America into the war far more intimately than previously known." Adam Entous in the NYT 

"This is the untold story of America’s hidden role in Ukrainian military operations against Russia’s invading armies."

10.SpaceX and Space Tourism

Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched the first human spaceflight mission to fly over the Earth’s polar regions, funded and commanded by cryptocurrency investor Chun Wang. 

The mission, called Fram2, after a Norwegian polar expedition ship that operated in the late 1800s and early 1900s, took off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Florida on Monday evening, carrying a crew of four private astronauts. Over the course of three to five days, they will fly over and observe Earth’s North and South Poles and conduct research on the impact of spaceflight on human health.