1.Hyundai India bets big on premium cars and EVs on course to world’s largest IPO (so far this year)

Hyundai Motor India will continue to focus on premium vehicles across traditional, electric and hybrid models that bring higher margins, the company’s management said as they formally announced the world’s largest public offering so far this year.

India’s second-largest carmaker will have access to all propulsion technologies, including electric and hybrid, through its parent in Korea (Hyundai Motor Co.).

The IPO, which will be India's biggest ever, opens to investors next week and will involve the South Korean parent company  selling to a 17.5 per cent stake in its Indian division, valuing the business at up to $19 billion.

2.60% of unicorn founders in India are first time founders, says study

PrivateCircle Research, in an analysis, also said that out of the 261 Unicorn founders analysed in the report, 29 per cent took two attempts to build their first unicorn, while another 6 per cent took three tries.

For instance, Zepto founders built KiranaKart before landing on the idea of the quick commerce app.

Kunal Shah famously sold Freecharge to Snapdeal before launching the $6.4 billion-worth fintech Unicorn CRED. Vineet Rao built two companies (SpectraVR and Shopwest) before founding Dealshare.

PrivateCircle has considered a list of 110 Indian unicorns excluding companies like Ola Electric, Krutrim, Xpressbees, Glance, Globalbees, and Oxyzo -- which are the second or third unicorns started by the same founder.

3.Deal-making in India hits new high: M&A and PE lead the way, telecom tops

India's deal-making landscape witnessed a significant uptick in the third quarter of 2024, with a total of 551 deals valued at $19 billion. This marks the highest quarterly deal volume since the first quarter of 2022, reflecting increased investor confidence and a robust economic environment, according to a report by consulting firm Grant Thornton Bharat.

M&A activity reached an all-time high in terms of deal volumes, recording 214 deals in a single quarter. Three companies were on an acquisition streak this quarter, i.e., Nazara Technologies with nine acquisitions worth $223 million and Aditya Birla Group and Lodha Group with five acquisitions each.

4.Google DeepMind wins joint Nobel Prize in Chemistry for protein prediction AI

Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis has won a joint Nobel Prize for Chemistry for using artificial intelligence to predict the structures of proteins. Hassabis shares half the prize with John M. Jumper, a director at Google DeepMind, while the other half has been awarded to David Baker, a professor in biochemistry at the University of Washington for his work on computational protein design.

The potential impact of this research is enormous. Proteins are fundamental to life, but understanding what they do involves figuring out their structure—a very hard puzzle that once took months or years to crack for each type of protein.

By cutting down the time it takes to predict a protein’s structure, computational tools such as those developed by this year’s award winners are helping scientists gain a greater understanding of how proteins work and opening up new avenues of research and drug development. The technology could unlock more efficient vaccines, speed up research for the cure to cancer, or lead to completely new materials.

5.US weighs Google break-up in landmark antitrust case; Financial Times

The US Department of Justice on Tuesday set out potential ways to defang Google’s illegal monopoly in general internet search. Its ideas, which a judge will consider over the coming year, range from the relatively mild, such as limiting payments to smartphone makers in return for exclusivity on their devices, to so-called structural remedies — in other words, a break-up. A day earlier, another judge decreed Google must open up the Play Store, its shopfront for apps, to competition.

The cases — plus a third one over advertising technology — are complex, but boil down to a common idea: Google has created innovative products users and advertisers love, but then used overly sharp-elbowed tactics to entrench them. Curtailing those specific practices, be they the near-$20bn it pays iPhone-maker Apple to displace other search engines on its devices, or the up-to-30 per cent rents imposed on in-app payments, sounds sensible.

But if the question is how to reverse rather than stop monopolistic wickedness, it’s not clear courts and prosecutors have the answer. Being bigger has made Google’s offering palpably better. Strip away Android or Chrome from search and there’s every chance it will remain dominant. Customers may actively uphold the status quo. Europeans select a search engine when they set up a new phone; nine out of 10 still use Google.

Whatever courts may order, endless appeals are likely to push a final reckoning far beyond most investors’ horizon.

That makes it hard to see this as an existential threat. Investors so far don’t: Alphabet’s shares have fared no worse than Microsoft’s since December’s unfavourable app-store decision. That could reflect the fact that any real reckoning will take an age.

6.China is has come a full circle- and is becoming increasingly intrusive as it tries to boost the birth rate. 

The country has one of the world’s lowest rates — the average Chinese woman now has one child in her lifetime — and the population is declining, leading to economic concerns. Women told The New York Times that officials had asked them whether they planned to have children, and in some cases, questioned them about the date of their last menstrual cycle.

In earlier decades, Beijing was more authoritarian about family planning, but in the other direction, sometimes forcing women to undergo abortions under its one-child policy. The government hasn’t reached the same excesses, a demography expert said, but it still has “exactly the same mentality” of trying to control women’s fertility choices.

7.Indonesia’s coal miners are diversifying to prepare for a low-carbon future

Five of the country’s seven major producers are investing in other raw materials: One expects nickel mining to contribute 60% of revenues by the end of this year, up from 11% last year, while another wants coal to be less than 50% of its income by 2025, aiming to replace it with electric motorbike manufacturing and solar power plants. 

Indonesia’s coal production is still growing, but increasing social and regulatory pressures, as well as falling consumer demand, look likely to limit the business in the medium term:“In six to seven years, the coal business [will] run its course,” one company director told the Financial Times.

8.The battle to build India’s military jet engines;
Financial Times
 John Reed in New Delhi and Sylvia Pfeifer in London

Some excerpts from this long read:

“Only five countries — notably the current permanent members of the UN Security Council — know how to build them: the US, UK, France, Russia and China. Beijing, however, is just moving from a reliance on imported equipment from Russia and only recently test flew a fighter jet with a supposedly homegrown engine.Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles.

India was eager to join the elite club. But despite years of research, prototyping and testing, the Kaveri flopped. India had failed to produce an engine with sufficient thrust to power its current generation of Tejas light combat aircraft. Instead, it plans to use a version of the Kaveri in future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.

Yet India’s mission to build an “indigenous” military jet engine is back on. What it learned from its work on the Kaveri, not least its mistakes, may yet bear fruit. According to Indian defence industry officials, foreign diplomats and analysts, the world’s fifth-biggest economy is in an advanced stage of deliberations on producing its first world-class “Made in India” jet engine, working with a western partner that is yet to be decided.

While the foreign partner would bring its technological experience, the engine would be wholly developed and built in India — making it the first truly “indigenous” product of its kind. Once complete, the engine would be fitted into India’s new suite of fifth-generation advanced fighter aircraft due to be airborne by the mid-2030s.

A behind-the-scenes battle is now heating up, involving lobbying, horse-trading, and pledges about future ownership of intellectual property, to become the aerospace partner of choice for the world’s most populous country.

Jostling for the lucrative contract to help India fulfil its ambitions are three key players: General Electric of the US, the UK’s Rolls-Royce, and French group Safran. France and the US are already India’s second and third-biggest defence suppliers after Russia, whose aircraft and other military equipment India is diversifying away from.

Which partner New Delhi chooses would be freighted with geopolitical implications. It comes at a time when India’s international ambitions are rising, its military rivalry with China is deepening, its relationship with the US is expanding and the Modi government is aspiring to join the world’s top tables, including the UN Security Council.

On the table for the three companies — and the governments backing them — is a decades-long partnership across both defence and civil industries with a fast-growing economy, one that will depend on imported knowhow and kit for years to come.”

9.Art or Trash? It Can Be a Fine Line.

A Dutch museum had to pick artwork out of the bin after a member of staff thought that the display, which consisted of two empty beer cans, was leftover rubbish.

All The Good Times We Spent Together by French artist Alexandre Lavet shows two dented beer cans on the floor. They were exhibited inside the museum’s lift as if left behind by construction workers.

However, a closer look "reveals that these dented cans were meticulously hand-painted with acrylics", the LAM museum in Lisse said.