Arvind's Newsletter-Weekend

1.Foxconn stops sending Chinese workers to India iPhone factories

Foxconn is halting new work rotations for its Chinese employees at its Apple iPhone factories in India, and sending Taiwanese workers instead, according to five people familiar with Foxconn’s operations in India. Shipments of specialised manufacturing equipment meant for India have also been held up in China, the sources told Rest of World. 

The development is likely to disrupt iPhone assembly lines in the Foxconn factories in the southern states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, which produce iPhones as part of Apple’s efforts to diversify production away from China. Some of the sources said the Chinese government is responsible for the suspensions of worker deployments and equipment exports.

2.Now playing: How India is finally becoming one unified cinema market

In 2024, Indians bought 883 million movie tickets, 6 per cent fewer than in the previous year. They spent over Rs 11,800 crore on those tickets (about 3 per cent less than in 2023), according to data shared by Ormax Media with Business Standard. Why then is there constant chatter about gloom and doom in the movie business?

“Perception,” says Ajay Bijli, managing director at PVR Inox, the largest cinema chain in India. Amit Sharma, managing director (entertainment) at Miraj Group, which operates 250 screens, agrees. “Bollywood (Hindi films) drives perception for Indian cinema. Since it underperformed in 2024, the perception is that it has been a bad year.” Just under half of the national box-office (BO) revenues come from Hindi films, which saw their share slip by 4 per cent.

Sukumar’s Pushpa 2: The Rule, a blockbuster that hit over Rs 1,400 crore at the domestic BO, is a Telugu film, also released in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. It is one of the highest-grossing Indian films alongside Dangal (2016), Jawan (2023), and RRR (2022). Of the top 20 films at the BO in 2024, five are Telugu, four Hindi, three Tamil, three Malayalam, and one English. Malayalam cinema doubled its share of the national BO. The homogenisation of distribution, thanks to streaming platforms, means India is finally becoming one cinema market.

3.Mega management: Why Western univs are studying Mahakumbh

Mahakumbh Mela is a unique event in the world with none matching it in size or scale. Prayagraj, a city with a population of 5.5 million, will host nearly 40 crore pilgrims during Mahakumbh, compared to the 25 crore footfalls in 2019. The grand event is celebrated every 12 years when the sun, moon and Jupiter align in a specific way.

More than two dozen prominent universities and other educational and research institutes from around the world as well as in the country are going to camp in Prayagraj during Mahakumbh to study various aspects related to the largest religious gathering in the world. Harvard, Stanford, London School of Economics, Kyoto University, AIIMS, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras and JNU are some premiere institutes that are going to send professors, research scholars and students to stay at Prayagraj.

What attracts different researchers is how the gargantuan management of the Mela works without any major disruptive incident, accident or crime.

Mahakumbh will see a veritable pop-up metropolis, constructed using tents, pontoons and bamboo structures, which will house millions of pilgrims and be completely dismantled after the festival. The temporary metropolis will feature everything from spatial zoning and infrastructure supply lines to food distribution networks and public gathering spaces.

4.The world was 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial average during 2024, the first time the threshold has been broken for an entire calendar year. 

The target refers to decades-long averages so has not been missed, yet, but there is not far to go. One climate scientist told the BBC that “It’s not like 1.49°C is fine, and 1.51°C is the apocalypse — every tenth of a degree matters,” but the number has political and symbolic importance. The hottest 10 years on record are all in the last decade, extreme weather such as floods and droughts is on the rise, and one study found that ocean temperatures last year were the highest ever recorded.

5.Predicting the “digital superpowers” we could have by 2030

Computer scientist Louis B. Rosenberg predicts that context-aware AI agents will bring “digital superpowers” into our daily experiences by 2030.

The convergence of AI and body-worn devices, like AI-powered glasses, will likely enable these new abilities. 

Rosenberg outlines his predictions for the future of technologies like AI, augmented reality, and conversational computing across three phases. Read on.

6.Rising Climate Risks

Wildfires engulfing swaths of Los Angeles are expected to be one of the US’s costliest natural disasters, with insurers potentially incurring losses of more than $10bn. The ominous start for 2025 comes after a Munich Re report showed last year’s natural catastrophe-linked losses soared to $140 bn, the highest since 2017 and the insured losses globally were more than double the 30-year average of roughly $60 billion.

Hurricanes Milton and Helene, which ripped through the US, ended up being the costliest natural disasters of 2024. And this year may already be on track to exceed those losses, as wildfires in the Los Angeles area threaten to be the most financially damaging in history.

7.The seven travel trends that will shape 2025

As you start to look at the year ahead, have you thought about how you will be travelling? The world's travel firms – from Airbnb to Booking.com – have.

Here are some of the top trends forecasted for 2025, as predicted by some of the world's leading travel brands and tour operators.

8.Old wine in new bottle? Andersen Consulting brand set for resurrection

A 1990s name makes a comeback with help from George Shaheen, who led it for more than a decade.

Andersen Consulting, one of the most powerful professional services brands of the 1990s, is set to be resurrected with the aid of the man who led the consulting firm for a decade. The revival comes courtesy of Andersen Global, a tax business founded by alumni of the firm’s former parent company, auditor Arthur Andersen, which collapsed in 2002 after the Enron accounting scandal.

The Andersen Consulting name has been dormant since 2000 when the business split from Arthur Andersen and rebranded as Accenture. Andersen Global has been quietly building a consulting arm after hiring George Shaheen, who was Andersen Consulting’s chief executive from 1989 to 1999, as a senior adviser. It plans to relaunch the historic brand next month, said people familiar with the effort.

9.America’s internet giants are being outplayed in the global south; The Economist

It is unusual for Amazon, the world’s biggest e-emporium, to be playing catch-up in its own industry. Yet that is exactly what it is doing in India, where last month it began piloting a quick-commerce service in the city of Bangalore, delivering a wide variety of goods in minutes. It is years behind local stars such as Swiggy, Zepto and Zomato, which already offer such a service.

A decade ago Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and then boss, stood atop a brightly decorated truck in Bangalore and waved a cheque for $2bn, determined to dominate India’s market. It has been an uphill struggle. The company, which accounts for a quarter of e-commerce sales in India, trails behind Flipkart, a local e-commerce rival that commands a third of the market (and is now owned by Walmart, America’s bricks-and-mortar behemoth). Elsewhere Amazon’s record has been worse. In South-East Asia it has been bested by local firms such as Shopee, Tokopedia and Lazada. In Latin America MercadoLibre, an Argentinian firm, is the undisputed leader in e-commerce (see chart).

America’s internet champions once seemed destined to conquer the globe. With China off-limits, many turned their attention to expanding in other developing markets. Some of them triumphed, including Google, a search giant, and Meta, a social-media titan. But many did not, particularly in areas such as e-commerce, ride-hailing and digital payments, where local knowledge or physical presence matters. Uber, which once promised to make “transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone”, withdrew from South-East Asia in 2018 after burning through over $700m. PayPal, a payments firm, has struggled to make inroads in much of the developing world, even as digital payments have boomed.

Local challengers in the global south once imitated American offerings and competed with clever adaptations for their home markets. MercadoLibre and Flipkart built logistics networks in places where existing infrastructure was shoddy. MercadoLibre turned to motorcycles for congested cities. Flipkart introduced “cash on delivery” to counter mistrust of online payments. Now internet firms in the global south are moving from adaptation to invention—and teaching American firms a thing or two in the process.

Quick commerce is one example. The pandemic-era frenzy in the West for ten-minute deliveries has largely fizzled out. In India it is just getting started. In its densely populated cities, where roads are often gridlocked, riders on two-wheelers zip around making small deliveries to lots of customers, relying on networks of compact warehouses. The products on offer go well beyond groceries and include everything from clothing and electronics to gold coins. Bernstein, a broker, reckons that quick-commerce sales in India reached $7.2bn in 2024, up from just $200m in 2021, and will almost double this year.

Another example is digital banking. Whereas centuries-old banks continue to dominate in the West, digitally native ones have made big inroads in the global south. Nubank, a Brazilian digital lender, has more than 100m customers in its home market, representing over half the adult population, and is expanding quickly across Latin America. Its approach has been to focus on segments of the population that have been underserved by traditional banks, whose reliance on physical branches makes it expensive to serve poorer customers. Having started with credit cards, it now offers bank accounts, insurance and investments. A strategy of targeting underserved customers has also worked well for Meesho, an online marketplace that has focused on India’s smaller cities and is now its third-largest e-commerce firm by sales.

A final example is social commerce, which blends shopping with entertainment. It has taken off in South-East Asia, where most online shopping is done on smartphones (65% of e-commerce sales in Indonesia are made on mobile devices, compared with 39% in America). Jianggan Li of Momentum Works, a Singaporean research firm, notes that traditional e-commerce sites spend heavily to lure in users. Social selling keeps costs low as users come to be entertained and stay to shop.

In 2021 TikTok, a short-video app owned by ByteDance, a Chinese tech giant, launched TikTok Shop, which lets users buy products while scrolling. In 2023 the app sold $20bn-worth of products, with three-quarters of that coming from South-East Asia. The model proved so successful in Indonesia that the government banned e-commerce sales on social-media platforms to protect small merchants. TikTok acquired Tokopedia in response, and now offers a similar service through it. In September Shopee announced a partnership with YouTube, an American video site, to develop a rival offering.

Not all these innovations will have a place in the West. Costly labour and lower population densities make quick commerce tricky in America and Europe. It can be tough to find underserved populations in rich countries. Social commerce, though, is gaining momentum. America is now the largest market for TikTok Shop, overtaking Indonesia last year. Although America’s Supreme Court is deciding whether to uphold a ban on the app in the country from January 19th, TikTok continues to expand elsewhere in the West.

That should remind America’s tech giants to keep an eye on innovations in the global south. Local ideas often take time to “bubble up” to headquarters in Silicon Valley, notes Kevin Aluwi, co-founder of Gojek, an Indonesian ride-hailing app, who is now a venture capitalist. Those delays could cost America’s champions dearly.