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Markets

Thoughts on Coca-Cola's Q2 2026 Earnings

Fans were annoyed at how the World Cup's hydration breaks kept stopping the games, but Coca-Cola didn't mind. Revenue was up 6% to $13.37 billion, and for the first time in years, the growth came from volume, not price.

Sanay Mehta

Business / Geopolitics

What Will Microsoft Do in the Future?

Microsoft has quietly shut down at least 15 offices and joint ventures in China over the last five years, even as it stays for reasons that have little to do with the 1.5% of revenue China represents.

Sanay Mehta

Real Estate / Business

Ten-Minute Delivery Is a Real Estate Business Wearing a Logistics Costume

The app is the marketing. The lease is the company. Strip away the routing algorithms and quick commerce is a land business competing for small boxes of urban floorspace, with the technology as the leasing agent.

Aditya Churiwal

Your Data Is Not Being Sold. It Is Being Used to Guess What You Would Have Paid.

The great data scandal of our age is not theft. It is estimation. Firms are using your data to answer one question: what is the absolute maximum you would have paid before walking away.

The Back Office Became the Brain

Charles Schwab has opened a new office in Hyderabad, staffed for technology, engineering and operations rather than another call center. India's back-office is transforming into its own brainpower center.

Technology

A "Made in India" Chip Can Start Outside India

India now has semiconductor plants producing commercially. That sentence may suggest India is making computer chips from scratch. Sometimes it is not, and that says a lot about how the supply chain really works.

Energy

Your Roof Is Becoming a Power Plant

For most of its existence, electricity has been a one-way street. Rooftop solar turns the consumer into a producer, with more than 50 lakh Indian homes now generating their own power under PM Surya Ghar.

The Hardest Part of an EV Charger Is Getting Someone to Use It

Installing an EV charger seems like an easy business, until the waiting begins. An electric vehicle charger only makes money when a car is attached to it, and utilisation determines everything.

Economics

India Wants the World to Pay in Rupees

India relaxed trade-policy rules so exports paid for in rupees enjoy the same benefits as those in foreign currencies. It is settlement administration, but one that rests on who bears the currency risk.

Fintech

The Digital Rupee Can Be Money With Instructions

Cash does not care what you buy. India's digital rupee can be different: cash that knows the terms and conditions under which it can be spent, now piloted for food-subsidy payments.

Creator Economy

India Has 4.12 Million Creators. Most Are Not Businesses Yet

India does not have a shortage of influencers. It has a shortage of influencers who earn repeatedly. The creator economy has solved discoverability long before it has solved monetization.

Labour Economics

Your Delivery App Is Becoming Part of the Welfare State

A Swiggy rider, an Uber driver, an Urban Company professional: all earning through an app, none with traditional employment linkages. India is trying to build social security around non-integrated employment.

Technology

ONDC Is Trying to Break the Marketplace Apart

Amazon bundles discovery, delivery, payment and support into one company. India's Open Network for Digital Commerce wants to make Amazon optional. Think email, not marketplace.

Real Estate

Coworking Companies Sell the Right Not to Commit

A traditional office lease is a bet on the future. Flex-space operators sell uncertainty, or at least the ability to avoid it, and India's flex-office market just posted a record half-year.

Real Estate

How to Sell 400 Square Feet of Nothing

Shrinkflation has reached real estate, with a twist: the packet got bigger and the contents did not. Advertised apartment sizes have risen sharply for six years. The floor you can actually stand on has gone almost nowhere.

Gauri Agarwal

ESG & Sustainable Finance

The ESG Paradox: How Cigarettes Beat Solar Panels at Corporate Ethics

Imagine you are tasked with allocating capital for a morally conscious investment fund. If instructed to send it to the more socially responsible firm, the choice seems offensively obvious. Yet the leading ESG rating agencies will likely tell you to pour your capital into the tobacco company instead.

Manvik Gyanchandani

Sports Economics

A Human Being, Depreciated Evenly

Football clubs record players as intangible assets and write them down on a straight line. The transfer market has spent a decade reorganising itself around that convention, and the rules keep arriving a season late.

Network Effects

Why Is Padel the Fastest-Growing Sport in the World?

Over the past five years, nearly 40,000 new padel courts have been built around the world. A sport that was once largely unknown is now played in more than 150 countries. The real answer lies in one of the most powerful ideas in economics.

Vihaan Shetty

Credit Markets

The Paid Referee: How the Cure for Information Asymmetry Became a Business Model

Every market assumes both sides roughly understand what is being traded. The bond market enjoys no such comfort. Economics offers an elegant repair: insert a third party whose entire commercial value rests on being right about the other two. In practice it introduced a second asymmetry roughly as large as the one it was hired to close, and then charged rent on it.

Aditya Churiwal

Consumer Finance

Who Actually Pays For Your Cashback?

Imagine three people buying the same 400 rupee coffee at the same Starbucks in the same queue. One pays cash, one scans a UPI QR, one taps a credit card. All three pay 400 rupees. Two days later, exactly one of them finds eight rupees of cashback in their statement and feels quietly clever about it. Nobody printed those eight rupees. They came from somewhere.

Labour Economics

The Applause Discount: How the Jobs We Call Noble Learned to Pay the Least

In March 2020, Britain stood on its doorsteps at eight in the evening and clapped for the NHS. Twelve months later, the government offered nurses in England a 1 percent raise. That sequence is not a British scandal. It is a pricing mechanism, and it runs identically in Jaipur, Osaka and Long Beach.

Labour Economics

Why Your Salary Grew and Your Purchasing Power Didn't

My friend got a 9% hike this year. She was pleased, rightly, on paper. She doesn't feel richer. Her rent went up 12%. Her kid's school fees went up more than that. That gap is the actual story.

Naman Chopra

Free Delivery Is Designed to Make You Spend More

Your cart has ₹799 worth of goods. Then a message appears: Add ₹201 more to unlock Free Delivery. Delivery costs ₹80. So you add a ₹250 product. The website congratulates you for saving ₹80. You just paid ₹250 to save ₹80. That sounds irrational, doesn't it? And that's probably the point, one of the best techniques in e-commerce.

Restaurants Now Pay to Be Found

Open a food-delivery app and search for biryani. There may be hundreds of options available. You will likely shortlist fewer than a dozen. That makes the first page incredibly valuable. Restaurants used to compete on food, location, pricing and word of mouth. On a food-delivery platform, they compete on a different front - inside an algorithm. The app not only delivers their food, but also the road on which their restaurant lies. And the best addresses on that road can be bought.

Banking

Your Salary Is Raw Material for the Bank

Your employer deposits ₹80,000 in your salary account. You think of it as cash to spend. The bank thinks of it as funding. Banks need money to make loans, buy securities and to fund their balance sheets. A salary account is valuable not only because the bank can eventually sell you a credit card. Your monthly salary is a steady supply of one of the most important inputs for a bank: deposits.

Investing

A SIP Is Recurring Revenue for the Mutual Fund Industry

You are making a systematic investment plan (SIP) of ₹5,000 every month. For you, it may be a step towards disciplined investing. For the mutual fund industry, it is an invaluable recurring inflow. Because your money is systematically invested, barring an active decision to the contrary, it makes SIPs a great tool to not only build financial discipline but also generate a steady income for asset managers.

An Airport Is a Shopping Mall With Runways

You arrive three hours before your flight departs. You have already paid for the ticket. Yet before boarding you may buy a coffee, a meal, perfume, parking, lounge access or a last-minute gift. The airport can profit from nearly all of these. This helps make modern airport economics fascinating, and frequently surprising Airplanes create the traffic, but passengers create the marketplace.

Infrastructure

FASTag Turned the Tollbooth Into a Payments Network

A toll plaza used to be a cash counter. Stop. Lower the window. Hand over cash. Wait for change. Collect receipt. Move. FASTag turned that into a few seconds. That's a convenience. At a national scale, it represents something more. India's highways have transitioned thousands of toll plazas from being standalone cash counters to nodes in a digital payments network.

Consumer Finance

"No-Cost EMI" Still Has a Cost

A phone costs ₹60,000. Below the price is a more appealing number: ₹5,000 per month. No-cost EMI. The phone did not become cheaper. The timing changed. That difference is large enough to turn an impossible purchase today into twelve smaller decisions about tomorrow. "No-cost" financing can truly eliminate stated interest for the customer in some cases. It cannot eliminate the economics of lending. Someone is financing the purchase.

Sports Business

An IPL Team Does Not Need to Win the IPL to Make Money

There is an obvious way to evaluate an IPL team. Look at the points table. Businesses have a different metric. Revenue. Sponsorships. Media rights. Tickets. Franchise value. It has an intriguing implication for sport: a team can have a disappointing season on the field and a successful one off it. Why? Because the IPL has an economic model in which it sells its sport product intensively.

Technology

Mobile Data Became Cheap Because the Network Is Expensive

Thirty gigabytes of mobile data is an insane amount. Indian consumers can get it in relatively cheap plans. It's almost contradictory. If everyone is using more and more data every year, why does every additional gigabyte feel so cheap? Because telecom is an industry with very strange economics. The network infrastructure requires an insane amount of money to build, but once it's built, the marginal cost of every additional gigabyte is close to zero.

Markets

A First-Day IPO Jump Means the Company Sold Too Cheaply

A company launches an IPO at ₹500 per share. Trading begins. By the end of the day, it closes at ₹650. Investors cheer at the 30% listing gain. But the company may well be disappointed. It sold yesterday for ₹500 what the market is now willing to pay ₹650 for. The ₹150 windfall went to whomever got shares at the IPO price.

The Mermaid Tax: How Starbucks Turned Indian Aspiration Into Profit

You are not a rational consumer. You are a beautifully predictable one, and Starbucks understands you better than you understand yourself.

The Shelf Has Become an Auction

Open an app for quick commerce, scroll down to toothpaste. Several brands show up right away.

Consumer Finance

Your Cashback Begins With a Fee You Never See

You pay ₹1,000 with a credit card. Almost immediately, you receive a message on your phone: you have received a cashback of ₹20.

Healthcare

Your Blood Test Is a Logistics Business

A phlebotomist arrives at your home at 7 am. A tiny tube of blood is labeled, placed in a bag, and taken away.

The Airline’s Most Valuable Product Never Leaves the Ground

A customer buys groceries with an airline credit card. There is no flight, no bag checked, no aircraft taking off.

Healthcare

The Same Medicine Has Ten Prices

A doctor writes down the name of a drug. The chemist gets one strip of a wall full of hundreds of brightly coloured boxes.

The Popcorn Is Not a Side Business

You buy a cinema ticket for ₹300. At the concession counter, a tub of popcorn and a soft drink may well cost even more than the seat.

The Subscription Company Profits When You Forget It Exists

You have subscribed to a streaming service for a TV series. The series ends.

Economics

Your Wedding Gold Enters India’s Trade Deficit

A family purchases gold jewellery for a wedding. The necklace may represent tradition, security, status and a store of wealth passed between generations.