Arvind's Newsletter

Issue No. #1161

1.From Mumbai to mini-metros: India’s most valuable family businesses spread their wings: Mint

Mumbai remains the undisputed favourite for housing the headquarters of India’s most valuable family businesses, hosting 91 companies this year—a sharp rise from 65 last year, according to the 2025 Barclays Private Clients Hurun India Most Valuable Family Businesses List, jointly released by Barclays Private Clients and Hurun India. But Tier 2 cities are grabbing attention as they steadily step into the spotlight, the report noted.

Vadodara has six companies, while Coimbatore, Nagpur and Ludhiana each have four. These hubs host some of India’s well-known family-run names, including Inox India, Elgi Equipments, Sunflag Iron & Steel and Vardhman Textiles.

Reliance Industries, valued at ₹28.2 trillion and helmed by the Ambani family, firmly cements Mumbai’s top spot.

Among Tier 1 cities, the NCR comes second with 62 companies spread across New Delhi, Gurugram, Noida, Faridabad, Ghaziabad and Manesar—led by the Nadar family’s HCL Technologies, worth ₹6.5 trillion. Kolkata follows with 25 companies, trailed by Pune (21) and Chennai (17). Meanwhile, Ahmedabad, Bengaluru and Hyderabad each host 10 companies, underscoring the wide and robust footprint of family-run enterprises across India’s urban hubs.

The list also highlights standout first-generation entrepreneurs now joined by their next-generation leaders. Topping the list is the Adani family, worth 14 trillion through Adani Enterprises, Adani Ports and more. They’re followed by the Poonawalla family ( 2.3 trillion, Serum Institute), Murali K. Divi’s family ( 1.8 trillion, Divi’s Laboratories), the Nuwals ( 1.6 trillion, Solar Industries), the Reddys ( 1 trillion, Apollo Hospitals) and the Grandhis ( 98,300 crore, GMR).

2.India's annual retail inflation slows to 1.55% in July: Reuters

India's retail inflation in July eased below 2% for the first time in eight years, on the back of falling prices of food items including vegetables and pulses, hurting some farmers, but will have limited impact on the central bank's policy decision.

Annual retail inflation slowed to 1.55% in July as compared to 2.10% in June, and below a Reuters poll of 1.76%.

The figure was the lowest since June 2017, according to a government statement, and below the Reserve Bank of India's tolerance band of 2%-6%. The RBI is mandated to not let inflation fall below or above the range for more than three quarters.

3.Pixxel-led group to build India's first commercial EO satellite network: Business Standard

Giving a fresh impetus to private sector space industry in India, the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has announced the selection of Google backed start-up PixxelSpace India-led consortium — comprising Piersight Space, Satsure Analytics India, and Dhruva Space — to design, build, and operate India’s first fully indigenous commercial Earth Observation (EO) satellite under the public-private partnership (EO-PPP) model.

The private consortium would invest more than ₹1,200 crore over the next five years to launch a constellation of 12 state-of-the-art EO satellites equipped with panchromatic, multispectral, hyperspectral, and microwave SAR (synthetic aperture radar) sensors.

4.IT companies' valuation hits 5-year low amid selloff by investors: Business Standard

Top information-technology (IT) services companies continue to lose ground on the bourses as investors turn away from them owing to an earnings slowdown and threat from artificial intelligence. 

The combined market capitalisation of the country’s top five IT firms that are part of the BSE Sensex is down 24 per cent since January and their valuation has slipped to lowest levels in the past five years. 

The sector is trading at a discount to the BSE Sensex and trailing the price/earning (P/E) multiple for the first time in the past four years. 

The trailing P/E of the top five IT companies has now declined to 22.3 times from 25.5 times at the end of December last year and a record high of 36 times in December 2021.

5.IHCL's Ginger brand is leading the mid scale opportunity in India: Economic Times

Indian Hotel Company’s (IHCL’s) budget brand Ginger is leading the mid-scale opportunity in India and has the potential to even scale to 1000 hotels over time, MD and CEO Puneet Chhatwal said.

Tata Group-backed Indian Hotels Company Ltd (IHCL) has agreed to buy around 51% stake each in ANK Hotels Pvt Ltd and Pride Hospitality Pvt Ltd for a combined Rs 204 crore, giving fresh impetus to its network expansion drive in the domestic market. Most of these properties will be rebranded as Ginger hotels, which will expand the chain's Ginger brand to a 250-hotel portfolio, Puneet Chhatwal, MD and CEO at IHCL told ET.

6.Google vs Perplexity fight plays in India as AI battle intensifies: Rest of World

The push notification arrived quietly one morning in July on Airtel’s bright-red mobile app. The Indian telecom company had a tantalizing offer for its 360 million subscribers: Perplexity Pro, the artificial intelligence-powered search engine, was available free for a year. All they had to do was click on the “Activate” button.

Perplexity’s giveaway, which otherwise costs about $200 a year, came on the heels of an offer from rival Google just days earlier: a free, one-year upgrade to its Google AI Pro suite for every college student in India, with access to the Gemini AI model, the Notebook LLM tool, and an early-access coding co-pilot.

These moves, in the world’s most populous country, are just the most recent in the pitched battle for a piece of the fast-growing market for AI-powered search. Following the launch of ChatGPT and its quick adoption worldwide, big tech firms including Meta, Microsoft, and Google have scrambled to push their own alternatives, even as challengers such as Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Dia have entered the fray to redefine search with generative AI. OpenAI is also preparing to launch its own browser.

7.China urged domestic companies to avoid buying Nvidia H20 chips, claiming they are of poor quality and that they may pose security threats: Bloomberg

 Beijing’s move comes after the US recently greenlit exports of the chips to China as long as Nvidia pays Washington 15% of the revenue generated. Nvidia has said that the chips — less powerful than those it sells in the US — have no “backdoors” that would allow for remote access.

 Beijing’s push also affects AI accelerators from AMD, though it’s unclear whether any letters specifically mentioned AMD’s MI308 chip.

Some US critics have voiced their own concerns, that even H20 chips could give China’s AI firms a boost as Beijing and Washington vie for dominance in the industry. “You are selling our security for corporate profits” an expert told The New York Times.

Trump also extended a pause of sky-high tariffs on Chinese goods for another 90 days into early November, stabilizing trade ties between the world’s two largest economies.

8.Europe builds for war as arms factories expand at triple speed: Financial Times

Europe’s weapons factories are expanding at three times the rate of peacetime, stretching over 7mn sq metres of new industrial development that represents rearmament on a historic scale.

Building activity at European arms sites has gone into overdrive since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, according to a Financial Times analysis of radar satellite data covering 150 facilities across 37 companies. The data shows that Europe’s long-promised defence revival, driven by an injection of public subsidies, is beginning to materialise not just in policy rhetoric or spending pledges but also in concrete and steel.

It comes as EU governments argue over how to sustain arms deliveries to Kyiv, as well as rebuilding their own stockpiles, in the face of a potentially wavering US commitment.

Using more than 1,000 radar satellite passes, the FT tracked changes at sites associated with ammunition and missile production, two bottlenecks in the west’s support for Ukraine.

The scale and spread of the detected work suggests a generational shift in rearmament, moving Europe from just-in-time peacetime production towards building an industrial base for a more sustained war footing.

9.Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle: New York Times

“Since the early 2010s, a parade of billionaires, tech executives and even U.S. presidents has urged young people to learn coding, arguing that the tech skills would help bolster students’ job prospects as well as the economy. Tech companies promised computer science graduates high salaries and all manner of perks.

“Typically their starting salary is more than $100,000,” plus $15,000 hiring bonuses and stock grants worth $50,000, Brad Smith, a top Microsoft executive, said in 2012 as he kicked off a company campaign to get more high schools to teach computing.”

“But now, the spread of A.I. programming tools, which can quickly generate thousands of lines of computer code — combined with layoffs at companies like Amazon, Intel, Meta and Microsoft — is dimming prospects in a field that tech leaders promoted for years as a golden career ticket. The turnabout is derailing the employment dreams of many new computing grads and sending them scrambling for other work.”

“Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent."

10.The lost art of hitchhiking: What we can still learn from travel's most radical mode? BBC

Long dismissed as dangerous, hitchhiking is being rediscovered by a new generation of travellers seeking connection, adventure and a low-carbon way to see the world.