- Arvind's Newsletter
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- Arvind's Newsletter
1.Competition in quick commerce market increases as Tata owned Big Basket makes 10 minute the delivery default option
The company has merged its Super Saver (slotted delivery) and BB Now (quick commerce) services into a single interface, offering customers a seamless shopping experience.
Hari Menon, chief executive officer (CEO) and co-founder of BigBasket, said, “We're not eliminating slotted delivery, but making quick commerce the default option. This change reflects our commitment to rapid delivery and customer convenience.”
This shift has a huge significance to the ongoing market share war between quick commerce and traditional e-commerce players.
With this move, BigBasket now brings its over 30,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) to the quick-commerce segment. This is much higher than Blinkit’s 25,000 SKUs, and Zepto’s 10,000. Zepto has stated that it intends to increase SKU’s on its platform to 20,000 before the festival season begins.
2.Apple’s India expansion to create over 600,000 jobs, says report in Economic Times
The report suggested that by the end of the current financial year, Apple eco-system may add approximately 200,000 direct jobs, with women constituting over 70 per cent of this workforce. Government projections cited in the report indicate that each direct job typically results in at least three indirect jobs, potentially leading to a total of 500,000 to 600,000 new employment opportunities.
Officials told ET that Apple’s three contract manufacturers in India—Foxconn, Wistron (now Tata Electronics) and Pegatron—have so far created 80,872 direct jobs, while broader suppliers including the Tata Group, Salcomp, Motherson, Foxlink in Tamil Nadu, Sunwoda in Uttar Pradesh, and ATL in Haryana and Jabil in Maharashtra have jointly created around 84,000 direct jobs.
3.Maruti Suzuki's EV program
The company expects to release six EV models by the financial year 2030-31. The executive said the first EV model will go into production and sale in the coming few months and will be exported to Europe and Japan.
Maruti Suzuki India Ltd is facing a “small delay” in finalizing the site for their new plant, which will have an annual capacity of 10 lakh units. The upcoming plant at Kharkhoda in Haryana is set to start production by 2025-26.The company expects the small car segment's demand to rebound in the next two years.
The company is targeting exports to reach 7.5 lakh to 8 lakh units by year ending March 2031, he said. In the June quarter, exports accounted for 13.5% of the total sales, at 70,560 units.
In this fiscal, Maruti sees exports crossing 3 lakh units. India-made EVs will be exported to Europe, US and Japan, the SUV Fronx is already getting exported to Japan.
4.FPI inflows in Indian debt market cross ₹1 lakh crore mark in 2024 so far.
In August so far, an addition of Rs 11,366 crore was made, while the equities market saw a withdrawal of funds by FPIs to the tune of Rs 16,305 crore on the back of the unwinding of the Yen carry trade, geopolitical conflicts and the US recession. Analysts say that the uptick in FPI investments in the debt market is because of India's inclusion in JP Morgan’s Emerging Market government bond indices in June this year.
5.ULI can make the credit process quicker; the tricky part is recovery; Moneycontrol
On August 26, Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Shaktikanta Das announced that the central bank has begun a pilot project of the Unified Lending Interface (ULI), a technological platform that aims to provide friction-less credit by cutting down the time taken for appraisal, especially for rural and smaller borrowers.
Das equated the ULI to UPI or the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) saying just like the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) changed the payments ecosystem, the RBI expects the ULI to transform the lending landscape.
How will ULI work? We don’t have the full details yet. But, according to what the governor said, ULI facilitates seamless flow of digital information, including even land records from multiple data providers to lenders.
Further, it will enable the borrowers to get the benefit of seamless delivery of credit, and quicker turnaround time without requiring extensive documentation.
To sum up, by digitising access to customers' financial and non-financial data that otherwise resided in disparate silos, ULI is expected to cater to large unmet demand for credit across various sectors, particularly for agricultural and MSME borrowers. Let us see how this implemented especially on recovery process is managed.
6.Modi still most popular PM but performance rating dips: India Today’s Mood of the Nation survey
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, despite not winning a clear majority on his third term, remains the most popular prime minister in India's history, according to India Today's Mood of the Nation survey. However, his performance rating as the prime minister has seen a slight dip in the last six months, says the survey.
An interesting finding of the survey was the thinning of the rating gap between Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi when it came to picking who of the two was best suited to be the next Prime Minister.
Narendra Modi remained the overwhelming favourite, with 49 per cent of respondents choosing him as the next leader. On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi was picked by 22.4 per cent of those polled. This marked a six-point rating drop from the February 2024 edition of the Mood of the Nation for PM Modi and an eight-point rise for Rahul Gandhi over the same period.
7.Stakeholder Capitalism Still Makes Business Sense
by Paul Polman and Andrew Winston in Harvard Business Review.
(With thanks to Founding Fuel Publishing for point out this article.)
In their recent essay in Harvard Business Review, Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, and Andrew Winston, author of Net Positive, reflect on the progress and challenges of stakeholder capitalism since the Business Roundtable issued a statement in 2019 redefining the purpose of a corporation. The statement marked a shift towards a more stakeholder-centric approach, recognising the importance of serving customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. While there has been progress in areas like decarbonisation and DEI, the pace and scale of change are insufficient to address the pressing global challenges.
Polman and Winston argue that given the increasing urgency of climate change and other societal issues, companies need to take more decisive action to build better, more regenerative businesses. They write that true leadership requires courage and a commitment to addressing systemic issues. Companies should speak out on important issues like climate change, DEI, and democracy, and actively work to build a more equitable and sustainable future. They point out that building net positive businesses is not only morally responsible but also makes good business sense.
All of this needs courage. Read on.
8.Rules for traveling in retirement; Robbie Shell in Wall Street Journal
My preferred way of traveling in retirement is what I have come to call “a la carte" travel. It’s our way of handling the challenges of traveling in retirement—on our own time, at our own speed—without giving up the freedom and autonomy that we always valued in earlier years.
Below are six guidelines that have made our travel a lot more fulfilling—and a lot less exhausting.
1. Travel offseason
Everyone knows that peak seasons aren’t ideal for traveling. But retirees have more of a commodity that working people lack—time for offseason trips. After all, you have flexibility for perhaps the first time in your life. Take advantage of it.
Our last three excursions to Europe have been during the relatively quiet winter months: In December 2022, we started in Bilbao, Spain, then moved on to Brussels and Amsterdam with side trips along the way. In early March 2023, we chose Geneva, Lyon and Avignon. In late February this year, we headed off to France and several places in England. We needed to pack an extra winter coat, but we avoided peak-time waiting lines and jammed restaurants—no point testing our patience and stamina, both more finite now than before I retired.
2. Choose ‘secondary destinations’
As retirees, we have found it easier to adopt a slower, more relaxed pace by focusing on destinations that aren’t always on the usual tourist grid.
That was the strategy on our trip this year when we flew from our home in Philadelphia to London, and then journeyed by train that same day to Bath, a city that one of our sons had highly recommended for its famous Roman Baths. From there, we branched out to the Cotswolds in southwest England, and Cardiff, the capital of Wales.
We returned to London for some theater but chose a hotel new to us in a part of London we have never stayed in and went to places we have never been to. These included a visit to Charles Dickens’s home and, on impulse, a Sunday afternoon choral concert at the main church in Trafalgar Square, St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Moving on, we took the Eurostar (never done that) to Lille in northern France (never been there). One of the lesser known, less-crowded cities in France, Lille offers noteworthy architecture, museums and food that even at relatively inexpensive restaurants always served up at least one course I included in my travel journal.
3. Focus on just a few things
This might seem an obvious strategy for seasoned travelers, but it’s easy to slip, especially when enthusiasm for the day ahead is high after (in our case a substantial) breakfast. More can definitely be less when you’re traveling.
So we try to map out a plan of attack that is satisfying but not overly ambitious. Before we visited the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille, for instance, we identified five paintings we wanted to see, then made use of the benches strategically placed in front of or near them. We did the same for a visit to La Piscine in Roubaix, a remarkable design achievement for the architect who turned a former municipal swimming pool into an elegant modern art museum.
The building itself was reason enough for our outing, but we also sought out Degas’s famous sculpture of a 14-year-old dancer and nearby a carousel several feet high populated by delicately carved animals and people. I took pictures of both for my young granddaughter.
4. Stay at least three nights in each location
Packing and unpacking is a waste of energy. Cruises have the problem solved, but one way to approximate their advantage is to spend more nights in fewer places. By the second night, a hotel room or Airbnb is a moved-in place to rest. By the third night, it can become a familiar home-away-from-home.
5. Be prepared to improvise
When you travel in a la carte style, you are free to change the plans you made the day before for no particular reason. Maybe it’s the weather. Or perhaps you have a feeling that yesterday’s pace was too challenging or not challenging enough. Start the day whenever you want, and be open to impulsive detours to areas that aren’t on tourist bureau maps.
The common send-off for vacation trips is “Bon Voyage." In the years since I retired, our trips have indeed been good voyages. In our experience, the a la carte approach beats the prix fixe one. We are free to make our own choices and find our own adventures as we look forward to where the next day will take us.
