Arvind's Newsletter

1.IndiGo to offer ‘IndiGo Stretch’ business class on 12 routes, tickets start at Rs 18000

Budget airline IndiGo wants to capitalise on premium fliers too. India's top airline will introduce business class seats from mid-November on twelve domestic routes, marking the no-frills carrier's departure from an all-economy cabin. IndiGo will also launch "Bluchip' loyalty program, which will start around September.

Rahul Bhatia, the airline’s promoter and MD, said that, “Indigo will always be a low-cost airline. People use the word ‘low-cost’ quite loosely. Low cost is anything that you do, you have to make sure you have the lowest cost structure in the industry, and I don't put that in the context of India, I put that in the context of the world. And so, when we launch a new product like the one we launched today, it doesn't move away from the theme of our low-cost airline.”

Read his interview with Anu Sharma in Mint here.

2.Apple iPhone export surge catapults electronics to 3rd position in India’s exports

Driven by a surge in Apple iPhone exports from India, electronics has surged past gems and jewellery to secure the third spot among India’s top 10 exports by the end of theApril-June quarter (Q1) of 2024-25 (FY25).  Only engineering goods and petroleum products rank higher. In the same quarter of 2023-24 (FY24), electronics held the fourth spot.

While mobile exports of $4.8 billion during Q1FY25 constituted nearly 57 per cent of the total electronics exports, the increase was primarily driven by the generous rise in iPhone exports from India, which reached $3.5 billion in Q1.

3.Global stock markets fall sharply as worries grow over US recession and has roots in AI boom

Global stock markets tumbled on Monday, with the Japanese index suffering its worst day in 37 years, as investors fretted over the possibility of a US recession and dumped risky assets. US continued to tumble with the Nasdaq Composite tumbling 6.3 per cent shortly after Monday’s open, leaving the index on track for its worst session since early in the Covid-19 pandemic, as a global sell-off gathered pace.
Markets, which have been rising for most of this year, fell amid fears the Federal Reserve has been too slow to respond to signs the US economy was weakening, and might be forced to play catch-up with a series of rapid interest rate cuts. These could possibly begin with an emergency move before the next policy meeting in September, analysts said.

Indian markets followed in tandem with global peers, and Equity benchmark indices, BSE Sensex and the NSE Nifty, fell sharply on Monday to end in the red. At close, the Sensex was at 78,768.42, down as much as 2,222.5 points or 2.74 per cent.

4.Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina resigns after mass protests

Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has resigned and fled the country after protesters stormed her residence, ending her long rule over the country of 170mn following weeks of escalating demonstrations.

Student protests that started last month against a job quota system developed into a broader uprising against Sheikh Hasina after police and government loyalists cracked down on the demonstrators, killing as many as 300 people.

Bangladesh army chief Waker-Uz-Zaman announced in a televised address on Monday that Sheikh Hasina had resigned and the military would begin talks with the president and representatives of political parties on forming an interim government.

5.OpenAI has released a new ChatGPT bot that you can talk to

The new chatbot represents OpenAI’s push into a new generation of AI-powered voice assistants in the vein of Siri and Alexa, but with far more capabilities to enable more natural, fluent conversations. It is a step in the march to more fully capable AI agents. The new ChatGPT voice bot can tell what different tones of voice convey, responds to interruptions, and reply to queries in real time. It has also been trained to sound more natural and use voices to convey a wide range of different emotions.

The voice mode is powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model, which combines voice, text, and vision capabilities. To gather feedback, the company is initially launching the chatbot to a “small group of users” paying for ChatGPT Plus, but it says it will make the bot available to all ChatGPT Plus subscribers this fall. A ChatGPT Plus subscription costs $20 a month. OpenAI says it will notify customers who are part of the first rollout wave in the ChatGPT app and provide instructions on how to use the new model.   

6.Intel was once a Silicon Valley leader. How did it fall so far?

Intel stock is tumbling amid news that the company will lay off 15 percent of its staff after a steep decline in revenue and billions in losses in its chip foundry business.

The company is scrambling to shore up reserves by introducing layoffs and suspending stock dividends. But even those moves may not be enough to return the veteran tech company to its once-vaunted spot as an industry leader, especially in the face of heavy competition, particularly from rival chipmaker Nvidia.

Semiconductor technology — which is crucial to everything from our phones to operating airplanes — was the foundation of Intel’s business when the company started in the 1960s. (Co-founder Gordon Moore was responsible for Moore’s Law, which theorized that semiconductor power would grow exponentially smaller, more powerful, and less expensive over time.) But as the company’s recent announcements indicate, Intel is no longer the innovative leader it once was. Read on.

7.A Roman road, sand dunes and gold mines: These are the 24 new UNESCO World Heritage Sites for 2024

Last month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) named the new cultural and natural properties inscribed on its list of World Heritage Sites. 

Properties on the list are considered to be of outstanding universal value and benefit from the highest level of heritage protection in the world.

There are now 1,223 World Heritage Sites around the globe. The new additions this year include Moidams - the Mound-Burial System of the Ahom Dynasty at the foothills of the Patkai range in Eastern Assam.