Arvind's Newsletter

1.TCS, Reliance Industries and Infosys have topped Interbrand's Best Indian Brands 2023 ranking

According to a report, two brands owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani– Reliance Industries and digital unit Jio made it to the list of top five most-valuable brands in India.

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), however, retained the top spot as the most valuable brand in the country. IT company Infosys and and HDFC Bank occupied the third and fourth positions respectively on the list.

2.After the Adani-Hindenburg fiasco, SEBI, India's securities regulator, wants Indian companies to be more transparent about their foreign investors.

SEBI’s new measures will force foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) who hold more than $3 billion in total in Indian equity markets to disclose granular information about their investments. The rule will also apply to any FPIs who hold 50% of their equity assets under management in Indian equities.

“Enhanced transparency measures for fully identifying all holders of ownership, economic, and control rights may be mandated for certain objectively identified high-risk FPIs that fulfil certain criteria,” the SEBI paper says.

3.Innovation has never been more important—and leading innovators are showing why. The top 50 companies in BCG’s 2023 Most Innovative Companies report outperform the MSCI World Index on shareholder return by 3.3% points per year. Tech companies dominate the top10 spots of this ranking; there is only one Indian company in the top 50 -Tata Group.

4.Beijing has not signaled any definitive timeline for unifying mainland China with Taiwan, a recent analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s public statements showed. The report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies comes amid growing Western fears that Beijing is readying to overrun Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province. The CSIS study said that while U.S. officials have largely cited classified intelligence, economic shifts, and military trends in their warnings of Chinese aggression, public statements “play a disproportionate role as instruments of alignment” within China’s political system. Beijing wants to avoid “an overly rigid or near-term timeline that would limit its flexibility and options,” the CSIS report’s authors said.

5.A top Canadian pension fund has put the brakes on its investment in China, making it the latest western investor to pull back from the country amid rising geopolitical tensions reported the Financial Times.

Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), the C$400bn ($295bn) global investment group, has stopped making private deals in China and is closing its Shanghai office, according to people familiar with the matter.

The fund — which manages money on behalf of pension and insurance plans — is following other large investors in dialling back their activity in the world’s second-largest economy

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC has slowed the pace of its direct investments in China, while Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan said in January that it had paused future direct investments in the country.

CDPQ is closing its Shanghai office later this year and is now leading its regional investment efforts from Singapore.

Several high- profile foreign executives, including Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, and Jamie Dimon, the chair and chief executive of JPMorgan, have made recent visits to the country.

But Dimon did warn of the risk for investor confidence of “uncertainty” about the Chinese government’s policies, as manufacturing data showed that the recovery in the world’s second-largest economy is faltering.

Private equity firms in particular could face a reckoning over the close ties they have built to China. Some Chinese state-backed investors, such as the State Administration of Foreign Assets and China Investment Corporation, have poured money into dozens of western buyout groups, the Financial Times has reported. The close relationship between private equity and the Chinese state has become increasingly at odds with the shifting political mood in western capitals, where governments have become much more vigilant about the potential for Chinese influence over strategic industries.