Arvind's Newsletter

1.Hasta la Vista, Vistara!

As India bids farewell to Vistara, which took its final flight on Monday, loyal fans flooded social media with heartfelt tributes. Incidentally I was on one of the last flights of Vistara from Mumbai to Pune.

According to The Economic Times, the luxury airline’s merger with Air India, finalising today, signals a major shift in India’s aviation landscape, reducing full-service carriers from five to just one over 17 years.

Though Vistara's schedules, routes and cabin crew remain unchanged for now, many are anxious about the possible service declines post-merger. Singapore Airlines, Vistara’s 49% stakeholder, now holds a 25.1% stake in Air India as it leads this major transition. I returned to Pune on an AI flight tonight - service was no where near Vistara or the erstwhile Jet Airways but was better than I expected. That will not be enough as I and other become regular fliers of AI. AI will need to learn new planes does not enough to enhance service standards. Indigo is already gearing up by launching Business Class on select routes and its own loyalty programme -Blue Chip

2.SBI looks to raise Rs 10,000 crore through 15-year infra bonds next week

State Bank of India (SBI), India’s largest lender, is looking to raise Rs 10,000 crore through 15-year infrastructure bonds as early as next week, said multiple sources aware of the development.

Market participants expect a coupon in the range of 7.15-7.18 per cent for SBI's upcoming infrastructure bond issuance. This comes as demand for longer-tenor papers has remained strong in recent domestic capital market offerings.

3.RIL to pump Rs 65,000 cr into Andhra Pradesh for 500 biogas plants, its biggest RE investment outside Gujarat

Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) will invest Rs 65,000 crore in Andhra Pradesh to set up 500 compressed biogas plants (CBG) over the next five years. This will be the biggest investment by the company outside Gujarat under its clean energy initiative.

4.SoftBank returns to profit as Indian IPOs boost Vision Fund gains

Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group swung to a ¥1.2tn ($7.8bn) profit in its latest quarter, driven by a string of successful initial public offerings in India and better tech valuations.

SoftBank saw a string of its investment companies — including e-scooter maker Ola Electric and baby products retailer FirstCry — go public in an “August Harvest season in India”, said Devi Subhakesan, an independent analyst from Investory who publishes on Smartkarma. 

Subhakesan said SoftBank could eventually see its $450mn investment in Indian food delivery group Swiggy jump in value through its IPO this week, although investors have been giving the company a lukewarm reception as it tries to grow in a fiercely competitive sector.

SoftBank benefited from valuation gains at South Korean ecommerce group Coupang and Chinese ride-hailing company DiDi, which it said was helped by interest rate cuts and Chinese stimulus measures. There was also a positive impact on net income from the weak yen.

5.Apple targets 32% of iPhone production and 26% of value in India by FY27

Apple Inc and its vendors are aiming to assemble 32 per cent of iPhone’s global production volume and 26 per cent of its value in India by 2026-27 —a year after the final year of the  of the five-year production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme for mobile devices.

This could translate into a production value of over $34 billion, assuming global iPhone sales remain consistent with 2023-24 (FY24) levels.

6.Chinese tech giant Baidu is expected to unveil new smart glasses with built-in artificial intelligence Tuesday. 

Baidu has unveiled artificial intelligence-powered smart glasses as Chinese tech groups race with global rivals to capitalise on AI-integrated hardware. 

Li Ying, head of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, said its smart glasses would “become a private assistant” during a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday. 

The glasses are run on Baidu’s large language model Ernie and will enable wearers to track calorie consumption, ask questions about their environment, play music and shoot videos, said the company.

While China is lagging behind the US in developing the most powerful large language models, experts have said Chinese tech groups could leverage the country’s sophisticated electronics sector to develop competitive consumer hardware integrated with AI. Baidu’s glasses will initially only be sold in China.

7.China’s trade surplus is on track to hit a record of nearly $1 trillion. 

The surplus leaves China “on a collision course” with the US by exacerbating global trade imbalances, Bloomberg reported, and provoking US President-elect Donald Trump, who mainly views Beijing “through the lens of its massive bilateral trade surplus,” the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer wrote in a note to clients. 

Trump’s vow to impose hefty tariffs on Chinese exports to the US isn’t a bluff, Bremmer argued, but “whether it elicits a meaningful engagement to negotiate with the Chinese or a tit-for-tat response irrespective of the economic costs will depend on how hard and high he goes.”

8.The rise of audiobooks has changed what it means to be a reader, a literary critic argued. 

More than half of adults in the US listened to audiobooks in 2023, and the industry is booming. The pleasures of listening to literature are different from those of reading it, wrote Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times — “the seductions of voice” rather than the tactile, visual pleasures of turning pages and beautiful fonts.

But readers are increasingly comfortable switching between the two, and audiobooks’ growth does not seem to be cutting into print book sales. She cited an academic saying that “people are expanding how they make use of literature, what reading is and can be.”

9.Europe wants you to travel by train. But why is it so complex and expensive?

Across the continent, flights are priced at a fraction of the cost of train tickets, hampering the growing number of people who want to travel sustainably. The big question is: why?

There's no question that people want to travel by train, despite the higher prices and occasional inconveniences. Some governments are also prioritising it. In France there is a ban on short-haul flights if there is a rail alternative that takes less than 2.5 hours; and in Spain, a similar ban is being considered as part of its 2050 climate action plan.

Yet, for all the rise in travel options and bookings, there continues to be a disconnect: people in Europe are finding that significantly higher prices and complicated booking situations thwart their desire to be sustainable.

10.'I just can't': Why so many consumers are sick and tired of online shopping

In a recent Accenture survey of 19,000 consumers around the world, 74% of respondents said that they had abandoned an online shopping cart at least once in the past three months because they felt "bombarded by content, overwhelmed by choice and frustrated by the amount of effort they need to put in to making decisions." This inability to commit to a purchase was reported by people shopping for clothes (79%), flights (72%), and even snacks (70%).

Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore College psychology professor, famously called this the "paradox of choice": While having a wider variety of choices can initially make us happier, the more options we have, the harder it can be to choose the best one for us.