businesstoday.

in

ARE WE
January 23,12,
December 2022
2021` 150
` 100

HEADED
FOR A
BNPL Nirmala Sitharaman
Finance Minister

ALPHABET

TRAP?
BUY NOW,
ECONOMICS
Will GDP growth
result in a V,
W, or K-shaped
recovery? With an
unwanted O for
PAY LATER Omicron in the
mix, the picture
SCHEMES ARE just got muddied

MUSHROOMING.
PG.36

THEY ARE NIFTY, How the arranged

marriage between Zee
USEFUL, and Sony could
pan out PG.42
BUT RISKY, TOO Apple finally swings
into the Indian
PG.26
consumer’s party PG.48
 FROM THE EDITOR
The New
Genie in Town
T
he Indian consumer never had it better. Whether it is the
latest appliance or low-value purchases, the craze around
point-of-sale credit has seen consumers making a beeline
for such credit options that enable them to make purchases
without having to make immediate payments. Welcome to
the world of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) schemes, which are burgeoning
by the day and have captured the imagination of the aspirational Indian
middle class. These BNPL schemes—offered by several platforms such
as Paytm, LazyPay, ZestMoney and even banks—have fuelled consump-
tion by making it extremely easy for consumers to make purchases. The
borrower gets the option of an instant, short-term loan with a deferred
repayment tenure, including the facility of equated monthly instalments
after the end of an interest-free period. The BNPL offerings are attrac-
tive since they are small-ticket loans, often for daily consumption pur-
poses. While they are like credit cards, these don’t have the hassles of
an application process, card-swiping infrastructure, and purchase and
cash withdrawal limits. Put simply, they could be a consumer’s dream.
No wonder, then, that the BNPL market is set to surge to a hefty
$45-50 billion, or `3.37-3.75 lakh crore, by 2026, from just $3-3.5 billion
(`22,500-26,250 crore) now, and become almost as big as the traditional
credit markets like personal loans and credit cards. However, as Teena
Jain Kaushal and Anand Adhikari write in our cover story, there are major
downside risks with more and more first-time consumers, often without
any credit history, lining up for such BNPL schemes, particularly in the
smaller cities and towns. While hidden costs and inadequate disclosures
often make it tough for new-to-credit customers (estimated at about
50 per cent of those availing BNPL credit) to understand the nuances of
these offerings, there is also the danger of increasing non-performing
assets on the lenders’ side as there is often very little information avail-
able about the borrowers. It is no surprise that globally, too, regulators
in the US and the UK are keeping a close watch on the BNPL segment.
Meanwhile, as India gets ready for the Union Budget of 2022-23, we
take a close look at what the nature of GDP growth could be, and whether
the economic recovery could be V-, K-, or even W-shaped, with various
economists and experts putting out different possibilities. While some
experts, including policymakers, feel India would likely see a sharp, V-
shaped upturn, there are many who feel the widening chasm between a
strong corporate sector and a struggling micro, small and medium enter-
prises segment will lead to a K-shaped recovery with the two tails of the
alphabet showing the different trajectories of the two sectors. With the
Omicron variant of Covid-19 casting a shadow over the economy, all eyes
will now be on Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s next Budget.
As we welcome the new year, our team of reporters also brings you the
trends and the people who are likely to dominate discussions and head-
lines in the coming year, and the key developments to keep an eye on. I
wish you and your families a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2022.
sourav.majumdar@aajtak.com
@TheSouravM
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 CONTENTS
08 THE BUZZ:
PHOTOGRAPHIK

The Festive
Spirit
January 23, 2022 | Volume 31 | Number 2
A look at festive
season spending

10 THE BUZZ: POINT

ARE WE
The Class of
2021

HEADED
Here’s how the
overall asset
classes performed
in 2021

FOR A 12 THE BUZZ:

BRIEFINGS

BNPL TRAP?
What’s Hot,
What Will Be

Most anticipated
strategic

BUY NOW, PAY LATER

4| moves in 2022

SCHEMES ARE MUSHROOMING.

THEY ARE NIFTY, USEFUL, BUT RISKY, TOO COVER STORY

26
20 THE BUZZ:
SPOTLIGHT

On Your Radar
People who will be
at the centre of
the action in
the New Year

Cover by ANIRBAN GHOSH; Nirmala Sitharaman photograph on cover by BANDEEP SINGH

42 ZEE-SONY

36 ALPHABET ECONOMICS Arranged

Marriage
Shape of the Curve
As they unite for
Is it a V? Is it a K? L? U? W? The pattern of India’s a new future,
economic recovery has got economists seized in a Zee and Sony
game of Alphabet Economics. Meanwhile, there’s also still face several
the threat of Omicron, and it could be a nasty customer hurdles

Business Today 23 January 2022

 48
ELECTRONICS

APPLE’S INDIA
After years of
languishing on the
fringes, Apple has
finally made its
78
presence felt in India THE GOOD LIFE:
with record sales and TECH TONIC
market share over the
past two years. But has
its winning strategy to Stay Fit
effect the turnaround and Fine
set it up well to mint
further gains? These nifty gadgets
will keep your
New Year fitness
resolutions on track

6|

THE BT INTERVIEW 61 INNOVATION 66

‘I’m not emotional A Breath of Purified air
about my businesses’
Allabout Innovations is aggressively
expanding production of its
80
Ajay Piramal on his plans for the financial
services business, succession & retirement anti-viral air purification device THE GOOD LIFE:
DOWNTIME

Out of the Box

For a CEO, Divya
Jain uses the most
uncommon tool for
focus: she throws
punches, literally

82
THE BEST ADVICE
I EVER GOT
OVERSEAS MARKETS 70 THE GOOD LIFE: TRENDS 74 ‘Always have
Should You Invest Overseas? The Scent of Me a people-first
approach’
Many broking firms are facilitating Welcome to the
investments in international markets. world of bespoke or Nevil Patel,
We give you the lowdown on the personalised perfumes, the Director,
challenges and risks involved ultimate in luxury ORPAT Group

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE BUZZ
PHOTOGRAPHIK THE POINT BRIEFINGS SPOTLIGHT

8|

PHOTOGRAPHIK
Photograph by Subir Halder
Text by RAHUL OBEROI

Source: Reserve Bank of India

Business Today 26 December 2021

 |9

THE FESTIVE `14.6 16.94 `13.95

SPIRIT LAKH CRORE
Total value of
PER CENT
The growth against
LAKH CRORE
The pre-pandemic
THE FESTIVAL SEASON HAS DRIVEN transactions done `12.49 lakh crore
HIGHER CONSUMER SPENDING IN POS spending
at POS terminals in in full calendar figure in the full
2021 COMPARED TO PRE-COVID-19.
BUT OMICRON COULD SPOIL IT ALL Jan-Nov 2021 year 2020 year of 2019
Business Today 26 December 2021
 THE BUZZ — THE POINT

The
Cryptocurrency
emerged as the top
asset class of 2021,
while equities grew
in double digits. But
precious metals such as

Class of
gold eroded investors’
wealth in a year that
saw crude oil prices
jump more than 50 per
cent. Here’s how the

2021
overall asset classes
performed in 2021.

By RAHUL OBEROI

Stellar …But Digital

Returns from Currencies
Equities… were in a
Benchmark indices Different
S&P BSE Sensex and
NSE Nifty gained League
22 per cent and 24 per Solana, the fifth-largest
cent, respectively, on digital currency, delivered
a year-to-date (YTD) mind-boggling returns
basis

TOP 5 SECTORAL GAINERS

ON THE BSE IN 2021
Capital Goods
68.8%

Technology
65.9%

Information

53.4%
56.1%
Power

Metal

55%
Realty
Tata Motors

TOP 5 GAINERS IN
162.6%

THE NIFTY IN 2021

1,323%
12,582%
Bajaj Finserv
Industries

459%
97.4%
Hindalco

85.2%

Mahindra
84.7%

84.1%
Wipro

69%
Bitcoin
Binance Coin
Tech

Ethereum
Solana

Tether
1%

YTD change as on December 31, 2021 YTD change as on December 31, 2021
Source: ACE Equity Source: Coingecko, Investing.com
 Real Estate Precious …While Fixed Deposit
Struggled Metals Rates Showed Slight
This asset class
continued to deliver
Lost Their Improvement
negligible returns to Sheen this Four of the top five banks by market cap
raised FD rates marginally
investors
Year…
Gold delivered BANK FD INTEREST RATES
lacklustre returns FD Tenure: >3 years to <=5 years
As on Dec 31, 2020 As on Dec 23, 2021

GOLD PRICE
(`/ 10 GM)

1-3%
31-Dec-2020

31-Dec-2021
50,005

47,899

RESIDENTIAL

-4.2%
Kotak Mahindra Bank

0%
5.35% / 5.4%

5.3% / 5.35%

4.75% / 5.3%
5.5% / 5.75%

State Bank of India

5.4% / 5.4%

CHANGE
HDFC Bank

COMMERCIAL
ICICI Bank
Axis Bank

YTD change
as of Dec 31,
2021
Source: MCX

YTD return on investment (RoI) as

on December 22, 2021 Fixed deposit data compiled by BankBazaar.com; Data taken from respective banks’ website.
Source: ANAROCK Property Data compiled on December 23, 2021; The maximum offered interest rate is considered for >3
Consultants years to <=5 years tenure; interest rate is for a normal fixed deposit amount below `1 crore.
 THE BUZZ — BRIEFINGS

WHAT’S HOT, WHAT WILL BE

Year 2022 promises much action on multiple fronts in business and economy. Here’s the
lowdown on the most anticipated strategic moves in the new year.

MARGIN The Third Wave

PAINS THE SPIKE in Omicron cases has brought back the
Elevated global fuel and spectre of restrictions on gatherings and movement of
people, which is likely to impact the reviving service
commodity prices have
shrunk profit margins
sector. The medical tourism industry, which started
reviving last quarter, is now witnessing a drop in medi-
THE BUD-
of the manufacturing cal value travel patients in hospitals across India. The GETED FIS-
industry, with most unable
to pass on the entire impact
education sector was pinning hopes on vaccination
of children aged 15-18, but is again expected to step CAL DEFICIT
of expensive raw materials back. The rising epidemic curve may severely hit rev- FOR FY22 IS
to consumers amid muted
demand. The core con-
enues of restaurants, airlines, cinema halls, among
others. Tough times ahead, again. 6.8%. ECON-
sumer price index inflation, —NEETU CHANDRA SHARMA OMISTS
which is non-food and non- EXPECT THE
fuel, continued to remain
elevated above 6 per cent in NUMBER
November. Wholesale price TO BE BET-
index-based core inflation
climbed to a fresh high of
TER ON THE
12.3 per cent in November BACK OF
12 | and remained over 11 per BETTER TAX
cent for the fifth straight
REVENUES

6.8%
month. No relief seems to
be in sight in the new year.
—DILASHA SETH

PHOTOGRAPH BY YASIR IQBAL

DEFICIT GAINS
What will the fiscal deficit
be at the end of FY22? The
Reserve Bank of India, in its
financial stability report, has
expressed reservations over
the Union government’s abil-
ity to rein in the fiscal deficit
at the budgeted 6.8 per cent
after it moved the second
supplementary demand of
grants worth `3.73 lakh crore.
But economists expect the
HIGH FUEL and number to be better than
commodity pric- the budgeted one on the
es have choked back of a 65 per cent growth
profit margins of in net tax revenues in the
manufacturing April-November period. In
companies
the period, the fiscal deficit,
which is the gap between the
government’s revenue
and expenditure, touched
46.2 per cent of the budget
target compared with 135.1
per cent of the target in
FY21. While the disinvest-
ment target of `1.75 lakh
crore is unlikely to be met,
Devendra Kumar Pant,
Chief Economist, India
Ratings, says the higher
tax and non-tax revenue
collections are expected
to more than offset the
shortfall in disinvestment,
“leading to the fiscal
deficit coming in at 6.6 per
cent of GDP in FY22”.
—DILASHA SETH

Business Today 23 January 2022

 CONCERTS
GO HYBRID
In 1939, S.V. Narayanas-
wamy Rao established the
Sree Ramanavami Music
Festival; today it is one of
the most popular classical
music festivals, with 6,000
people attending it every
year in Bengaluru. In 2021,
the festival went hybrid
with 31 online concerts.
Music festivals are being
re-imagined with virtual
avatars, private chat rooms,
VR walkthroughs, etc.
Experts say hybrid shows
are here to stay and music
streaming platforms like
Airtel’s Wynk and Times
Internet-owned Gaana can
capitalise on the trend by
pivoting to live shows and
e-concerts.
—PRERNA LIDHOO
ALL EYES ON
RESOLUTION
The building blocks for
the ‘Bad Bank’ for resolving
`2 lakh crore of bad loans
are ready. The new entity—
National Asset Reconstruc-
tion Company—is now in
the process of buying bad
loans. Clearly, the challenge
is going to be the acquisition
price for bad assets and
ILLUSTRATIONS BY RAHUL SHARMA
restructuring and resolu-
tion by another entity, India
Debt Resolution Company.
At a time when dozens of
private asset reconstruction
companies are struggling,
there is a lot at stake for this
dedicated Bad Bank with a
dual structure, which is a
new experiment for India.
—ANAND ADHIKARI
SENSEX
At least seven brokerages have told Business Today
that the domestic equity markets may continue
to deliver double-digit returns in 2022. But it may
PEEKS AT
be a roller-coaster ride because of the uncertainty
70K
around Omicron, increase in interest rates and a
surge in inflation globally. “In case of positive global
and domestic cues, we may see Nifty at 21,000 and
Sensex at 70,000 by December 2022,” says Gaurav
Garg,Head of Research, CapitalVia Global Research.
—RAHUL OBEROI
START-UP SCRUTINY
Start-ups going in for IPOs in 2022 will have to
deal with tighter disclosure and compliance norms
of the Securities and Exchange Board of India. At
its board meeting on December 28, SEBI capped the
quantum of IPO proceeds that a firm could use for
inorganic growth while further segregating the limit
to be utilised if an acquisition target has already been
identified. It also capped the quantum of shares that
existing shareholders can sell as part of the IPO if the
firm is a loss-making one—as is the case with most
start-ups. This will have a major impact on PE and VC
players who have been offloading their shares as part
of the IPOs of almost all start-up entities.
—ASHISH RUKHAIYAR
| 13
INDIA
Charge ’em Up
HAS SET IF 2021 saw the most number of electric ve-
hicle (EV) launches, 2022 promises to be the
A STIFF year of the EV for automakers. According to
TARGET OF the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehi-
cles, in 2020, 150,000 electric two- and four-
100% wheelers were sold in the country; some stud-
ies suggest that the number was surpassed
ELECTRIFI- in the first half of 2021. And while India’s goal
CATION of 100 per cent electrification by 2030 might
sound a little too ambitious, companies such
OF THE as Hero Electric, Ather, Okinawa and Ola are
AUTO trying to build scale like never before.
—PRERNA LIDHOO
SECTOR BY
2030; AND
PLAYERS
IN THE
SPACE
ARE
BUILDING
SCALE
100%
Business Today 23 January 2022
 THE BUZZ — BRIEFINGS
CROWDED
SKIES
Despite the concerns from
the coronavirus, 2022 will be
a year of intense activity in
India’s aviation market. For
one, after the completion
of regulatory approvals, Air
India will finally return to
the Tata group after 68 long
years. The summer will see
the entry of stock market
bull Rakesh Jhunjhunwala-
backed low-cost carrier
Akasa Air. Jet Airways, too,
might fly again. These
developments have led other
players to pull up their socks.
Market leader IndiGo’s Co-
founders Rahul Bhatia and
Rakesh Gangwal have finally
ended their three-year-long
feud. Fare wars soon? Likely.
—MANISH PANT
14 |
IT SERVICES
SHINE
The new year brings good
tidings for information tech-
nology (IT) services com-
panies. The robust demand
environment for IT services
is expected to continue in
2022 with Gartner estimat-
ing a 9.1 per cent growth in
IT services spend in India in
the coming year compared
to 10.8 per cent growth
2021. The top four—Wipro,
Infosys, TCS, and HCL
Technologies—are set to
clock double-digit revenue
growth in this fiscal and also
the next one on the back of
a strong deals pipeline glob-
ally due to the digitalisation
drive post the pandemic.
—DILASHA SETH
AIRPORT BOOST
Airlines may have to wait for another year or two to
take off from the Jewar airport (the foundation stone
of which was recently laid by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi), but the region is fast turning into the most
attractive greenfield urban development site in the
country. In 2022, construction activity in the Noida-
Greater Noida-Jewar region is set to gain further
steam as players like InterContinental Hotels Group,
Signature Global, Gaurs and Bhutani Group look to
invest around the new facility that is set to become the
largest cargo hub in India by 2027-28.
—ARNAB DUTTA
Tatas’ Flight
Plans
With Air India as good as in the bag, With the backing of the group, this full-ser-
the Tatas are bound to make big moves in vice airline could be the disruptive element
their aviation business in 2022. It almost in Indian aviation. The last part is Vistara, a
holds all of AirAsia and there is a good joint venture with Singapore Airlines, and its
chance that this will be merged with entry into the overseas markets. With scale,
fellow low-cost airline, Air India Express. network and a brand name, the Tata group’s
MODI PHOTOGRAPH BY CHANDRADEEP KUMAR; CONSTRUCTION PHOTOGRAPH BY YASIR IQBAL
A lot of time will be spent in getting the aviation story looks formidable.
loss-making Air India back on track. —KRISHNA GOPALAN
Getting Real
HOME WHILE DEMAND for all major big-ticket items
SALES ARE
is stuck in a downward spiral, the pandemic
has turned the tide for the residential real es-
SET TO tate market. Indians are increasingly looking
for own homes and larger units, setting the
GROW BY stage “for an overall turnaround in the year
2022”, says Housing.com. After registering
25% IN 2022, a 20 per cent growth in sales in 2021, home
WITH AVER- sales are set to grow by 25 per cent in 2022,
with average quarterly sales of 36,000 units,
AGE QUAR- matching the pre-pandemic numbers, if not
TERLY SALES the pre-demonetisation levels.
—ARNAB DUTTA
OF 36,000
UNITS,
MATCHING
THE PRE-
PANDEMIC
NUMBERS
25%
Business Today 23 January 2022
 THE BUZZ — BRIEFINGS
$19
BILLION
THE SPACE
RACE
Move over SpaceX and
Blue Origin. Skyroot Aero-
space, Agnikul Cosmos,
Tathya Earth, Bellatrix
Aerospace and Digantara
are among home-grown
start-ups that are support-
ing India’s efforts at con-
quering the final frontier of
space. Founded by twenty-
somethings, these entities
plan to launch rockets, de-
sign geostationary satellites
and harness remote sensing
16 | to meet the growing
demand for geospatial solu-
tions. With India planning
two unmanned missions
before a human spaceflight
programme, space is where
you want to be.
—MANISH PANT
HOME-GROWN
SPACE start-ups
are supporting
India in con-
quering the final
frontier
IBM SAYS THE AVERAGE COST OF A DATA
BREACH INCREASED BY 10% TO $4.24 MILLION
IN 2021. NO WONDER THAT THE MARKET
FOR CYBER AI TECHNOLOGY AND TOOLS IS
EXPECTED TO GROW BY $19 BILLION BETWEEN
2021 AND 2025, ACCORDING TO TECHNAVIO
TECH
LISTINGS
FRENZY
If 2021 kicked off the start-
up IPO parade, 2022 will
truly push the gas pedal.
A bevy of start-ups—in-
cluding OYO, Delhivery
and PharmEasy—are IPO
ready, meaning the tech
IPO frenzy is only begin-
The Cyber AI Knight
ning to gather steam.
Zomato’s blockbuster
IPO triggered a paradigm
THE COST of cybercrimes continues to rise—the ave r- shift in the way Indian
age cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4.24 million, investors look at tech
a 10 per cent increase from 2019, says IBM. With the stocks. According to
adoption of 5G and increased network connected de-
global deal tracking firm
vices, enterprises are looking at AI for security. Cyber
AI will enable organisations to not only respond faster Dealogic, $6 billion of the
to attackers, but will also help them anticipate these $15 billion raised in 2021
moves and react to them in advance. Cyber AI tech- via IPOs was garnered by
nology and tools are in the early stages of adoption tech firms. The inflection
and as per Technavio, the global market is expected point for India’s start-up
to grow by $19 billion between 2021 and 2025. story has truly arrived.
—NIDHI SINGAL —BINU PAUL
DATA PROTECTOR
The General Data protection law in both
Protection Regulation houses of Parliament
(GDPR) of the Europe- in December 2021.
an Union is the tough- In the Committee’s
est privacy and security view, all data has to be
law in the world. India, dealt with by one Data
too, might be on its Protection Authority
way to a similar law, (DPA). It has recom-
subject to amendments mended approximately
and revisions. Two 24 months for imple-
years after the bill was mentation of the Act.
presented in the Lok We might finally see a
Sabha, the 30-member positive impact on how
Joint Committee tabled companies store and
its report on India’s use consumer data.
first proposed data —NIDHI SINGAL
Business Today 23 January 2022
 THE BUZZ — BRIEFINGS

INSTANT
DELIVERIES
Will the promise of 10-min-
ute grocery deliveries be
a game-changer for e-
commerce? Zepto doubling
its valuation in two months
and Grofers rebranding

DIRECT
itself to Blinkit to align with
the trend are early signs of
FROM the hype; big guns, includ-

SATELLITE
ing Swiggy and bigbasket,
are pouring millions into it.
This high-volume business,
With a lot of action
happening in the satellite Quest for Green Fuel run on dark stores or hy-
perlocal micro-warehouses
internet space globally, UNION MINISTER Nitin Gadkari dreams of making closer to customers, con-
in 2022 India will see the India’s automobile sector No. 1 in the world. This, tinues to draw top investor
commercial launch of the he says, can happen in the next five years by using dollars. But will it last? 2022
much-anticipated service. alternative fuel sources. In fact, he has bought a car may have the answers.
Companies such as Elon that runs on green hydrogen. The government also
—BINU PAUL
Musk’s Starlink, Bharti plans to run buses, trucks and cars on green hydro-
Airtel’s OneWeb, Telesat’s gen produced from sewage water and solid waste.
Many companies, too, are working on similar solu-
Lightspeed and Amazon’s tions. Pune-based Sentient Labs, for example, has
Kuiper are building their launched a 32-seater hydrogen fuel cell bus with
network of low Earth a range of 450 km by using 30 kg of hydrogen. The
orbit (LEO) satellites in new year is likely to see more such examples.
18 | space. Satellite internet
—PRERNA LIDHOO
will be a boon for areas

YOU COULD
soon have an-
other dish on
your terrace
THE YEAR OF NFTs
to access the Non-fungible to- assets. They’ve gained
internet kens, popularly known popularity among icons
as NFTs, were among with everyone from
the most searched Amitabh Bachchan to
where connectivity isn’t terms of 2021, beating Yuvraj Singh launching
available, is unreliable, Dogecoin, blockchain their own NFTs. While
or is not easy to deploy, and even Ethereum NFTs are in their early
and will be low latency in Google searches. phase, they’re likely to
broadband with speeds as They’ve become a part attract a much larger
high as 100 to 200 mbps. of popular culture audience in the coming
You might also just have with brands such as years. With blockchain
yet another dish installed Pepsi and Adidas also set to change the world,
at your terrace that would joining in. NFTs are 2022 is going to be an
intercept internet from transforming art, mu- even bigger year for
space. Go figure. sic and sports, enabling NFT technology.
—NIDHI SINGAL monetisation of digital —SMITA TRIPATHI

INVESTMENTS DERIVED FROM THE PLI

10
MILLION
SCHEMES COULD BE OVER $504 BILLION IN
TERMS OF PRODUCTION AND WOULD ADD
AROUND 10 MILLION JOBS IN THE NEXT FIVE
YEARS, THE GOVERNMENT SAID RECENTLY

Business Today 23 January 2022

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PLI THE NEW
BUZZWORD
Production Linked Incentive
schemes are considered to
be a game changer to turn
around India’s inabil-
ity to scale up. In 2021, the
government launched PLI
schemes across 10 key sec-
tors, including recently on
semiconductors. So far, PLI
schemes spanning mobile
phones, drugs and medical
devices have attracted
investments of over $5 bil-
lion. An official statement
recently mentioned that the
investments derived from
the PLI schemes could be
over $504 billion in terms of
production and would add
around 10 million jobs in the
next five years.
—RAJAT MISHRA
MATTERS OF
CURRENCY
In 2022, expect more details
and maybe some action on the
Central Bank Digital Curren-
cy (CBDC) front. Proposed
as its virtual currency by the
Reserve Bank of India, “It will
basically be a technology-led
exchange of the Indian Rupee
with RBI oversight on the
supply as well as usage,” says
Vikram Subburaj, Co-founder
and CEO of Giottus Cryp-
tocurrency Exchange. A big
advantage of CBDC is that all
transactions can be tracked.
But there’s a hitch: No
country has yet implemented
a CBDC-based economy,
although many, including
China, are testing it.
—TEENA JAIN KAUSHAL
THE BUZZ — BRIEFINGS
Co-working Surge
As large companies are experimenting with hybrid
work models and tapping into the talent pool from smaller
towns and cities, co-working and flexible office spaces
are pegging themselves as an easy way for enterprises to
switch to flexible work. Awfis Space Solutions’ Founder &
CEO Amit Ramani and Chairman & MD Jitendra Virwani
of office parks builder Embassy Group,
whose subsidiary is WeWork India, are both
bullish about the demand for co-working
spaces among large enterprises in 2022.
—VIDYA S.
OTT Players Gear Up
for Regional Battle
OTT players continue to bet on regional language content
as the next round of India’s mobile internet users and consum-
ers of digital content are coming from smaller cities and towns.
A FICCI-EY report says 50 per cent of the time spent on OTT
platforms would be on regional content by 2025. Clubbed with
an increasing interest among advertisers for regional audi-
ences, existing and newer OTT players are expanding their
investments and content offerings in vernacular languages. As
this boom is likely to strengthen in 2022, newer content-shar- | 19
ing formats are also likely to emerge among the OTT players.
—VIDYA S.
Under RBI’s Care
RBL BANK is the latest to join the list of trou-
bled banks facing RBI’s wrath. Turnaround
man Vishwavir Ahuja, whose tenure was cut
A FICCI-EY
short to a year, has proceeded on leave. NPAs
are rising, loan growth is stagnant and profit- REPORT
ability, down. RBI brought in Yogesh Dayal as
additional director on the bank’s board for bet- SAYS THAT
ter coordination. While RBL is well capitalised
with comfortable NPA provisioning ratio and
BY 2025,
liquidity levels, depositors and shareholders 50% OF
are anxious due to the recent debacles of YES
Bank, Lakshmi Vilas Bank and PMC Bank.
THE TIME
—ANAND ADHIKARI
SPENT ON
OTT PLAT-
FORMS
WOULD
BE ON
REGIONAL
CONTENT
50%
Business Today 23 January 2022
 THE BUZZ — SPOTLIGHT
ON YOUR RADAR
The businessmen, ministers and policymakers who will be at the
heart of economic and industrial action in the New Year
NEXT STOP:
THE CONSUMER
IF THINGS go as per plan,
Adani Wilmar will list on the
bourses in early 2022. The
20 |
company is a name in the
FMCG space with a portfo-
lio of edible oil brands. Its
`4,500-crore public issue
will see Adani Group being
listed outside infrastruc-
ture, a space where it has
made a mark. For Group
Chairman Gautam Adani,
it is a way to unlock value
in a business and establish
itself as a B2C player.
—KRISHNA GOPALAN
BALANCING
THE ECONOMY
Union Finance Minister
Nirmala Sitharaman will
have a tough balancing act
to carry out in the 2022-23
Union Budget: accelerating
growth and presenting a
credible fiscal consolida-
tion path. Sitharaman and
her team of officers—led
by Finance Secretary T.V.
Somanathan—will need to
ensure augmented spend-
ing on capital and health
to insulate the economy
from external factors such
as Omicron and global
RENEWED ENERGY
AMBANI, DAS PHOTOGRAPHS BY BANDEEP SINGH; CHANDRASEKARAN PHOTOGRAPH BY YASIR IQBAL
After having raised billions of dollars in extreme-
ly difficult times from the likes of Facebook and
Google, Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms is on a
good wicket. The next stop for him could be raising
funds for the $10-billion push in renewable energy.
The ambitious foray has many layers, starting with
large-scale manufacturing to financing projects.
Given how bullish large global investors are about
renewable energy, Ambani could just end up con-
vincing them of the robustness of his ambition.
—KRISHNA GOPALAN
Forging a New Tata
DRIVING THE salt-to-software Tata group has
to be among the toughest jobs. For N. Chan-
drasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons, getting it
ready for the next phase means stepping up
existing businesses, as well as taking many hard
decisions. The areas of focus include the launch
of the super app TataNeu, integration of Air In-
dia within the group, moving ahead on the steel
business, developing a robust EV model and
making the IT story stronger.
—KRISHNA GOPALAN
CONTRARIAN
BANKER
EVEN AS central bankers
around the world hike interest
rates, Reserve Bank of India
Governor Shaktikanta Das is
holding firm. He wants to sup-
port growth as long as he can
with low interest rates despite
6.8
the RBI’s inflation projection
PER CENT
Of GDP is the hovering around the higher
fiscal deficit band of 6 per cent. Das has
target for FY22 kept the benchmark repo rate
unchanged at 4 per cent for
price shocks. There’s a need 20 months. But the process of
to gradually revert to the withdrawing surplus liquidity
fiscal consolidation path of has begun. Next would be inter-
under 6 per cent of GDP. est rates moving up.
—DILASHA SETH —ANAND ADHIKARI
Business Today 23 January 2022
 MARK’S INDIA-VERSE
WITH OVER 500 million
users across its apps
(Facebook, Instagram
and WhatsApp), India
plays a crucial role in
Meta Platforms’ plans.
With India revenues
crossing $1 billion and
CEO Mark Zuckerberg
highlighting the role of
local developers and
content creators, the
spotlight is on him as he
taps further into India
while navigating regula-
tory challenges, as well
as criticisms of hate-
mongering and misinfor- TRADE
mation in his apps.
—VIDYA S.
PARTNER
THE COMMERCE Minis-
try will play an instru-

Looking Beyond the mental role in shaping

India’s new foreign

Disappointment
trade policy in 2022,
which will guide foreign
trade for the next five
Paytm Founder and CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma has years. The year 2022
crossed the first big hurdle of public listing, but with a can also see a slew of
37 per cent loss at debut for shareholders. However, the bilateral and free trade
market is willing to wait for the company’s shift from a agreements, including
low-margin payments business to lending and wealth FTAs with the UK, the
management. Sharma is already scaling up Paytm’s buy- UAE and Australia. At
the helm of the minis-
now-pay-later offering, personal and merchant loans, and
try, Piyush Goyal, the
the credit card business. At some stage in the future, the government’s trouble-
43-year-old will need a full-scale banking licence to raise shooter for all seasons,
low-cost funds and earn high yields in the lending busi- has his task cut out.
ness. The road to profitability is still some distance away. | 21
—RAJAT MISHRA
—ANAND ADHIKARI

37
PER CENT
Loss for shareholders at
Paytm’s initial public offering
in November last year

Number of
acquisitions by Highway
Bengaluru-based Hurricane
BYJU’S in 2021, REGARDED AS among
including the GLOBAL the best performers in
PM Modi’s team, Nitin
$1-billion acqui- VOYAGER Gadkari, Minister of
Road Transport & High-
sition of Aakash ways, has his hands full
Educational The son of two schoolteachers from a village in Kerala, for 2022. NHAI has to
award a project pipeline
Services and Byju Raveendran is gearing up to take his edtech
behemoth to the public market. At $21 billion, BYJU’S is of `4 lakh crore by 2024.
some big-ticket the most valued start-up in India and the world’s most The development of 22
greenfield expressways

10
global purchases valuable edtech company. Raveendran is aggressively to connect major eco-
focussing on growth outside the domestic market now. nomic centres is well on
The company made 10 acquisitions in 2021, including his radar. Plans are also
some big-ticket purchases in the global market. With a afoot to provide broad-
potential public listing and plans of global expansion, band connectivity along
2022 will be a crucial year for Raveendran and BYJU’S. greenfield highways.
—BINU PAUL —MANISH PANT

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE BUZZ — SPOTLIGHT

INFRA’S
FINANCIER
The National Bank for Financing Infra-
structure and Development is expected
to play a key role in meeting the funding
requirements of the infrastructure sec-
tor of the world’s fifth-largest economy.
And as its first Chairperson, banker K.V.

CAPTAIN
Kamath will be in the limelight. Keep-
ing an open mind on lending up to `4
ON DECK lakh crore to finance both soft and hard
infrastructure over the next three years,
FROM AN initial capi- he is looking at issuing the first cheque by
tal of `5,000 in 1985 NaBFID in the June quarter.
to a net worth of over
`40,000 crore in 2021, —MANISH PANT
Rakesh Jhunjhunwala’s

`4
has been a success sto- LAKH CRORE
ry. The Big Bull, who has Financing target for
a stake in over 35 listed NaBFID over the
next three years
companies, is going to
promote the new airline
Akasa Air in the summer
of 2022. He is trying his
luck in aviation, which is
reeling from the impact
22 | of the pandemic. How-
ever, he is known for TOWARDS NET-ZERO

KAMATH PHOTOGRAPH BY RACHIT GOSWAMI; AGARWAL PHOTOGRAPH BY LANTERN CAMERA

taking tough decisions
that have helped him Overhauling India’s energy demands by pushing
accumulate massive for renewable energy is one of the most ambitious
wealth in the past. projects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This
—RAHUL OBEROI makes Power Minister Raj Kumar Singh a key
person to watch out for in 2022. Under Singh’s
stewardship, India will strive to reach the target
of 175 GW renewable energy generation in 2022.
With a likely investment of over $15 billion, the
sector will witness a boom in 2022. The year will
also see many policy changes as the country moves
towards achieving the net-zero target by 2070, as
announced by PM Modi at COP26.
—RAJAT MISHRA

BRAVING THE STORM The attempt to

IN SPITE of early success in the courtroom battle acquire a 49
against Reliance, Amazon India, headed by veteran
Amit Agarwal, is entering the new year with bigger
per cent stake
challenges. The 2019 deal to acquire a 49 per cent in Kishore
stake in Kishore Biyani’s Future Coupons has turned Biyani’s Future
into the biggest bone of contention between the
world’s largest e-commerce player and Mukesh
Coupons
Ambani’s aspirations in the Indian retail space. has become
Agarwal is likely to take the legal route as now only the biggest
a favourable verdict from the higher judiciary can
challenge for
turn the tide in Amazon’s favour.
the Amazon
—ARNAB DUTTA
India head

Business Today 23 January 2022


INSURING
THE INSURER
LIC’S DEBUT on the
stock exchange, likely by
March 2022, will be one
of the year’s most keenly
watched events. All eyes
will be on Chairperson
M.R. Kumar, who will
steer the insurance behe-
moth, with its total 1.3 mil-
lion agents (as of March
2021), over 100,000
employees and `34 lakh
crore of assets to a public
listing. With millions of
LIC policyholders across
the country, the IPO will
be the talk of the town.
—TEENA JAIN KAUSHAL
Luxe Shift
Acquisition of domestic
BUTSCHEK PHOTOGRAPH BY RACHIT GOSWAMI
brands points to a shift in
focus for Reliance Brands.
After acquiring stakes in
brands such as Manish Mal-
hotra and Ritu Kumar, CEO
Darshan Mehta formed
a 60:40 JV with Anamika
Khanna for owning and de-
veloping the brand AK-OK.
However, he is up against
rival Aditya Birla Fashion
and Retail, which pumped
in `398 crore and `67 crore
into Sabyasachi and Tarun
Tahiliani, respectively.
—SMITA TRIPATHI
THE NEW WORKPLACE
WITH THE pandemic how they go about imple-
changing how people menting hybrid work
work, organisations are models. The two firms
experimenting with hy- could also set the trend
brid work policies. The for how Indian IT firms,
CEOs of Alphabet and one of the largest em-
Microsoft, Sundar Pichai
(pictured) and Satya
ployers of the country’s
white-collar workforce,
Nadella, respectively, are
sure to grab eyeballs on
roll out their own plans.
—VIDYA S.
The Cricketer and
the Broadcaster
As BCCI President, former cricket captain Sourav Gan-
guly will be at the centre of the action around the auction
for IPL’s broadcasting and digital rights for the 2023-27
period, due in early 2022. Star India—and its OTT player
Disney+ Hotstar—holds the rights for the 2018-22 period,
for which it had paid `16,348 crore. This time around,
the IPL has reportedly set its sights on making around
$5 billion (around `37,500 crore) from the auction. With
Zee Entertainment, Sony Pictures Networks, Mukesh
Ambani-owned Network18, and Star & Disney India in
| 23
the game, it will be a tough contest.
—VIDYA S.
$5
BILLION
The amount that the BCCI is eyeing from the
upcoming auction for the IPL’s broadcasting and
digital rights for the 2023-27 period
STILL DRIVING
TATA MOTORS
THERE WAS a time when cars by
Tata Motors were used more as tax-
is than for personal use. In the last
five years, outgoing MD and CEO
Guenter Butschek has not only
transformed the company’s image,
but also made it synonymous with
EVs. But now, the company finds
itself in a tough spot after plans to
hire former Daimler AG Manager
Marc Llistosella fell flat. Butschek,
who stepped down in June 2021,
is expected to continue in the
first half of 2022 as a consultant.
Analysts say he might continue for
another year till the company finds
a suitable replacement.
—PRERNA LIDHOO
 THE BUZZ — SPOTLIGHT
THE BULL
RIDER
RADHAKISHAN DAMANI
made over $9 billion in 2021
and became India’s fifth
richest person, thanks to a
70 per cent rally in Avenue
Supermarts shares and his
rising investment in other
listed companies, includ-
ing India Cements. Select
24 |
brokerages are
bullish on Avenue Su-
permarts, as well as the
overall stock market going
ahead. Any further rally in
equities may further
increase his net worth,
which stood at $24.4 billion
on December 28, 2021, ac-
cording to the Bloomberg
Billionaires Index.
—RAHUL OBEROI
INDIA’S VC NO. 1
Sumer Juneja’s meteoric
rise to become the Manag-
ing Partner at SoftBank
in just three years is an
unusual feat. Juneja,
Partner and Head of India,
SoftBank, is credited
with steering it in a new
direction in the country.
SoftBank writes smaller
cheques and enters compa-
nies very early in their life-
cycle now. The company is
expected to exceed its 2021
investment figures of $3.2
billion. Rajeev Misra, CEO,
SoftBank Investment Ad-
SPLIT AHEAD
The Godrej Group will see signifi-
cant steps taken towards dividing
the $4-billion conglomerate between
two groups. One is led by the families
of Adi Godrej and his brother Nadir,
and the other by their cousins Jam-
shyd and Smitha. The group has a
presence in sectors such as consumer
goods, appliances, real estate and
$4
agriculture. With the best bankers
and lawyers overseeing the process, BILLION
it is learnt that most of the work will Worth of Godrej Group, which
has a presence in FMCG, real
be done over the next few months. estate, agribusiness, etc.
—KRISHNA GOPALAN
ON THE back of the government’s pro-
duction-linked incentive scheme (PLI),
the domestic electronics manufacturing
industry is expected to grow 30 per cent
in 2022. As the central government fo-
cusses on moving up the global supply
chain, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Minister
for Electronics and Information Technol-
ogy, is likely to announce a PLI scheme
for wearables in April. Under his minis-
AGGARWAL PHOTOGRAPH BY VIVAN MEHRA
try’s vision of 1,000 days, he will also fo-
cus on AI, blockchain, quantum comput-
ing, and prepare a skilled IT workforce
of 10 million. The minister, a masters in
DIGITALISING
technology from IIT Kanpur with an MBA
from Wharton business school, US, is
THE NATION spearheading two more important min-
istries: Railways and Communications.
—NIDHI SINGAL
TIME TO
DELIVER
AFTER MULTIPLE delays in de-
livery, problems for Ola Electric
scooters seem to have only
begun. The company is facing
questions over its product and
$10
service. Customers have been
BILLION told that much-hyped features
SoftBank’s India such as digital key and reverse
investment mode will be available only by
target for 2022 June 2022. Social media is also
littered with complaints. CEO
Bhavish Aggarwal said 4,000
visers, said that it is ready to hypercharger points will be
invest as much as $10 billion operational in 2022, but what
in India. Juneja will be lead- would be the use of these if one
ing this aggressive growth. has no scooter or a broken one?
—BINU PAUL —PRERNA LIDHOO
Business Today 23 January 2022
 DIFFERENT STROKES
OVER THE years, Indian same in a recent interview.
Hotels Company Ltd, Last year, the company
the parent company of launched two new busi-
Taj Hotels, has become nesses—amã Stays & Trails
asset light. Going for- and Qmin food delivery.
ward, growth will come Chhatwal is bullish on
mainly through man-
agement contracts.
2022, which might see new
businesses and the scaling MIDAS
CEO and MD Puneet
Chhatwal indicated the
up of existing brands. TOUCH
—SMITA TRIPATHI
TATA STEEL’S buyout
of Bhushan Steel for
`35,200 crore in May
Spearheading the 2018 took a while to
wrap up. It was the first
Privatisation Drive case under The Insol-
vency and Bankruptcy
Department of Investment and Public Asset Management Code, but took its time
(DIPAM) Secretary Tuhin Kanta Pandey pulled off one of before it went to India’s
oldest conglomerate.
the most complicated sales—the disinvestment of the govern-
It was a high-quality
ment’s stake in Air India—in 2021. In 2022, Pandey will be asset that fell on bad
in focus again, spearheading the government’s privatisation times, but in two years,
drive with full force. He will lead the stake sale in some key T.V. Narendran, Tata
corporations such as Life Insurance Corporation of India, Steel’s CEO and MD, has
Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd, Shipping Corporation of turned it around. The
India, Pawan Hans Ltd, Container Corporation of India, next step is to sustain
IDBI Bank, among others. the growth story. | 25
—RAJAT MISHRA —KRISHNA GOPALAN

Tuhin Kanta Pandey will lead the stake sale in some key cor-
PANDEY PHOTOGRAPH BY YASIR IQBAL

porations such as Life Insurance Corporation of India, Bharat

Petroleum Corporation Ltd, Shipping Corporation of India,
Pawan Hans Ltd, Container Corporation of India, etc.

The number of
jobs the
cryptocurrency
tech market has Zooming In
the potential ZOOM VIDEO Com-
munications, one of the
to create in the biggest beneficiaries of
country by the the pandemic, is likely
to have another signifi-
year 2030,
according to a
SPREADING WINGS cant year as video calls
become essential fix-
WITH CRYPTO going mainstream, India saw a massive tures at work. Although
September 2021 surge in the number of users in 2021. It is expected the company’s revenue
Nasscom report to rise exponentially if the Cryptocurrency Bill gets growth has slowed in re-

0.8
passed in Parliament in 2022. Big players such as cent quarters, Zoom and
(L to R in the picture above) Nischal Shetty, Founder its CEO Eric Yuan are
likely to be in the news
and CEO of WazirX, Ashish Singhal, Founder and as it explores collabora-
CEO of CoinSwitch Kuber, and Sumit Gupta, CEO of tions with rivals such as
CoinDCX, seem all ready to cash in on the wave. The Cisco Webex, Microsoft
growing interest should also push the industry towards Teams and Google Meet
innovation and generating more employment. to stay relevant.
MILLION
—TEENA JAIN KAUSHAL —VIDYA S.

Business Today 23 January 2022

 COVER STORY — BNPL

THE BNPL
MANIA
THERE’S A NEW GENIE IN TOWN.
IT’S CALLED BUY NOW, PAY
LATER, AND IT PROMISES TO
DELIVER ALL YOU NEED
THROUGH QUICK, VERY
SHORT-TERM,
INTEREST-FREE LOANS. BUT THIS
GENIE COMES WITH SIGNIFICANT
RISKS—HIDDEN COSTS, NEW
TO CREDIT POPULATION WITH
NO CREDIT BUREAU RECORDS,
LACK OF FINANCIAL LITERACY IN
SMALLER TOWNS, AND
REGULATORY GAPS. BNPL’S
VALUE PROPOSITION IS
UNDENIABLE, BUT SO IS THE
SPECTRE OF CONSUMERS
GETTING SUCKED INTO
UNCONTROLLED SPENDING, AND
SPIRALLING DEBT
BY TEENA JAIN KAUSHAL AND ANAND ADHIKARI
ILLUSTRATION BY ANIRBAN GHOSH

28 |
IS YOUR ELECTRIC bill lying unpaid? Or perhaps
your gas bill? Is your phone recharge due, or cable bill? Is
it because you are running a little low on cash or want to
spend elsewhere? Well, Freecharge, a Gurugram-based
fintech, has you covered with an instant one-month,
interest-free loan up to `10,000. Not just for utilities,
but similar loans with flexible repayment schemes are
also available at the checkout page of an Amazon or a
Flipkart, whether you buy an iPhone or a perfume. Ride-
hailing firm Ola lets you pay for all trips at once, every
15 days. And in case your holiday plan seems just out of
your wallet’s reach, travel aggregator MakeMyTrip is
ready to finance your tickets and hotel bookings. Just
buy now and pay later.
BNPL, as the loan product is popularly called, is the
latest financial pied piper, leading the millennial and
Gen Z generations as well as borrowers in under-served
and unbanked smaller towns into the world of credit.
The lyrics accompanying the tune are just as alluring—
‘dream big, pay small’. And these first-time borrowers
are following in hordes as they are, more often than not,
denied loans in the traditional banking system since
they lack a credit history.
In less than a decade, BNPL has become a global craze,
spanning Sweden to Australia and the US to the UK. Un-
like traditional bank loans—such as to buy a house or a
car, or personal loans—BNPL is a point-of-sale product.
The borrower gets the option of an instant, short-term
loan with a deferred repayment tenure, including the
Business Today 23 January 2022
option for equated monthly instalments (EMIs) after
the end of an interest-free period. The allure of BNPL
is that, unlike traditional loans, these are small-ticket
loans of as low as `3,000 for daily consumption purpos-
es. It’s similar to a credit card but without the hassles
of an application process, card-swiping infrastructure,
and separate limits for purchases and cash withdrawals.
Critically, there is scant checking of a borrower’s credit
bureau score and only a cursory check, if at all, of their
income statements before they get the loan. Sometimes
in minutes.
Little wonder, then, that BNPL has exploded in popu-
larity in India. The current BNPL market is worth $3-3.5
billion (`22,500-26,250 crore) and is expected to reach
an eye-popping $45-50 billion (`3.37-3.75 lakh crore)
by 2026, according to consultancy firm RedSeer. At
this rate, BNPL is all set to overshadow the traditional
credit markets that, after decades of effort, stack up at
`8.65 lakh crore for personal loans at banks and `1.23
lakh crore for outstanding credit card debt. The growth
thesis is simple. India’s credit card population is only 67
million, while banks are content with the top 100 million
crème de la crème. In comparison, the current count of
250 million Indians making digital spends on apps and
e-commerce portals will rise to 500-600 million in the
next three to four years. This is the BNPL target audi-
ence. “There is a large population of eligible credit users
in the market who have zero credit bureau footprint,”
says Upasana Taku, COO and Co-founder of MobiKwik,
one of India’s largest BNPL players.
BNPL IS NOT
ONLY THE MOST
ATTRACTIVE,
BUT ALSO THE
ONLY OPTION
AVAILABLE TO
FIRST-TIME BOR-
ROWERS SHUNNED
BY BANKS

And this potential has birthed
a host of BNPL platforms. On the
other hand, many existing payment
platforms, digital wallet operators
and even major e-commerce com-
panies have built a BNPL offering
on top of their existing payments
business. Now one can get BNPL
offers from Paytm Postpaid, Mo-
biKwik, Freecharge, ZestMoney,
LazyPay, ePaylater, CapitalFloat,
Amazon Pay, among others. Even
traditional banks are jumping in.
Axis Bank bought Freecharge from
e-commerce firm Snapdeal for
`385 crore in July 2017.
There are a couple of versions
of BNPL loans. The first is for
small-value transactions such as
e-grocery bills and online ticket-
ing. Here, there is no loan per se,
but the payment is deferred. There
is no interest if the amount is paid
on time, but a default attracts pen-
alties and charges. These loans are
apt for those who defer payments
to salary dates or to tide over in
case of a sudden income shortfall.
The other form of BNPL is similar
to a credit card, with EMIs after an
interest-free repayment window of
about 30-45 days. This is slightly
cheaper than credit cards and fits
in with making indulgent or im-
pulsive big-ticket purchases. “The
EMI product is focussing on bridg-
ing the gap between affordabil-
ity and aspiration,” says Siddharth
Mehta, CEO, Freecharge.
In either case, BNPL can im-
prove a borrower’s cash flow if
used prudently by paying the dues
within the interest-free window.
But that seldom happens, as seen
in the case of credit cards. A credit
or loan by any name is based on the
same playbook—the psychology
of spending. “People end up over-
spending. There is a temptation
to use it and pay later without re-
alising the implications,” warns a
private banker who requested ano-
nymity as the person is not autho-
COVER STORY — BNPL
FUELLING
THE BNPL FIRE
A look at why there is a
boom in buy now, pay later rised to speak to the media. So, it
use cases is no accident that BNPL’s growing
popularity coincides with Indians’
financial vulnerability in the wake
1 Changing consumption
patterns, rising of the Covid-19 pandemic. In fact,
aspirations in smaller the pandemic only accelerated and
towns solidified its adoption.
2 One-click offerings, Experts suggest that there is no
seamless KYC and problem with the BNPL product
onboarding per se but there are several risks
that come from hidden costs, lack
3 Apps integrated
into the shopping of disclosures and transparency,
and buying journey, and a new-to-credit population
growing e-commerce with no credit history. The lack of
business and online
payments
financial literacy in general, and
in smaller towns in particular, is
4
Rising smartphone harmful to borrowers but advan-
adoption, low tageous for lenders. “There is no
acquisition costs for
BNPL companies free lunch. If somebody is saying
zero per cent, there is someone
5 Credit to first-time else who is paying it,” says Madhu-
borrowers and
sudanan R., Co-founder and CEO
coverage of small
towns and cities of digital banking infrastructure
provider M2P Fintech. Besides, | 29
6 Small-ticket loan there are several regulatory loop-
offerings, no
operational costs
holes such as the lack of data pro-
tection laws, as well as lender-side
7 Low-interest rates, issues such as inadequate collec-
income cuts, and job tion frameworks.
losses post-pandemic
For now, though, both borrow-
ers and lenders are laughing all the
way to the checkout page, enjoying
the new-age avatar of an age-old
practice.
B
ajaj finance pio-
neered BNPL in 2013
and scaled up to cap-
ture 80-90 per cent
of the consumer durable financ-
ing market. The Pune-based
non-banking financial company
(NBFC) built the product on the
subvention method by partnering
with brands that gave discounts
and covered zero interest costs,
allowing it to offer customers in-
terest-free loans. BNPL, though,
predates Bajaj by decades in India
where the first form of lending
was the local kirana store opening
a khata, or bills-due book, for cus-
 COVER STORY — BNPL
tomers buying on credit. In fact, the
credit card was the first organised
BNPL product.
The concept of using transac-
tion flow to subsidise the cost of
credit to give consumers a cheaper
credit product, called BNPL, gained
popularity in the West over the past
5-7 years, says Lizzie Chapman,
CEO and Co-founder of ZestMoney
and President of the Digital Lenders
Association of India. Bajaj Finance
broadened the concept to cross-sell
other products, increasing its over-
all returns from each customer.
New-age platforms such as Paytm
and BharatPe soon followed suit to
make BNPL ubiquitous. “BNPL can
also be exercised on top of credit
cards. Today, all the credit cards
give an option of easy EMIs,” says
Bhavin Patel. The Co-founder and
CEO of LenDenClub, a peer-to-
30 | peer lending platform, has another
observation, “BNPL is a use case
rather than a product.”
This ubiquity is because BNPL
is not only the most attractive but
also the only option available to
first-time borrowers shunned by
banks as they have no credit histo-
ry. Today, more than 50 per cent of
the borrowers on BNPL platforms
are new to credit. This large popu-
lation, say industry executives, has
an unmet credit need for consump-
tion and discretionary purchases.
“We are only catering to their daily
use purchases such as grocery and
milk and shopping needs,” says
Amit Kumar, Founder and CEO
of GalaxyCard, which offers an
instantly approved smartphone-
linked credit card.
In fact, BNPL players under-
write new borrowers based on their
payment history, whether they be
for e-shopping or even utility bills.
These platforms have proprietary
models to assess an applicant’s
creditworthiness. “We have built
our own machine learning sort of
proprietary score. This helps us to
Business Today 23 January 2022
underwrite which users should be
given how much credit,” says Taku
of MobiKwik.
BNPL has also caught the imag-
ination of India’s middle class,
which is growing in tandem with
the gap between aspiration and af-
“There is a large fordability. “People are becoming
population of more aspirational,” says Patel of
eligible credit users LenDenClub. But they get no sup-
in the market who
have zero credit port from the traditional banking
bureau footprint… system that still demands salary
We have built slips and other proof to ensure in-
our own machine come stability. This is why credit
learning sort of penetration is extremely low in
proprietary score. semi-urban and rural areas. Gov-
This helps us to ernment statistics show the bank
underwrite which credit outstanding in the rural ar-
users should be
given how much eas was 10 per cent of GDP in 2019-
credit” 20, a far cry from the 67 per cent
nationwide number. But the sheer
UPASANA TAKU potential of this section of the pop-
COO & CO-FOUNDER, ulation overshadows any hesitan-
MOBIKWIK
cy and hiccoughs for lenders. “For
a non-salaried customer, there ex-
ists much patchier data. You have
to use a lot more complexity in
your model to make proxies and
sort of guess on income and ex-
penditure. But it’s not impossible.
It’s a lot of common sense,” says
Chapman of ZestMoney.
It’s a lot easier, though, to make
models for customers from small-
er towns and cities, who, according
to industry estimates, constitute
about a third of all BNPL bor-
rowers. India’s rising per-capita
GDP—close to $2,000 now from
“For a non-salaried roughly $1,500 a decade ago—re-
customer, there flects the gradual rise in income
exists much levels. Today, the proliferation of
patchier data. You e-commerce allows people from
have to use a lot all parts of the country to aspire
more complexity for the biggest and best of brands.
in your model And when they fire up their apps,
to make proxies they find a hassle-free BNPL prod-
and sort of guess
on income and uct at the point of sale that helps
expenditure. But it’s them afford the biggest and best.
not impossible” That is the core reason for the sky-
rocketing popularity of BNPL. “It
LIZZIE CHAPMAN is more a combination of demand
CEO & CO-FOUNDER,
ZESTMONEY and the need in the market, and
 SHARE OF AMOUNT DISBURSED (%) SHARE OF NUMBER OF LOANS (%)

11.91
7.38

34.42
2.07
51.83

52.76
38.15
NBFCs

0.72
0.47

0.10

0.01
0.19
EVERYONE’S
LENDING

16.49
While the quantum is low,

50.81

27.62
3.99

0.39
0.36
0.73
the number of BNPL loans
BANKS

2.4
36

37

21
3
disbursed is high

PERSONAL LOAN

BNPL

SME LOANS

VEHICLE LOANS

GOLD LOAN

OTHERS

PERSONAL LOAN

BNPL

SME LOANS

VEHICLE LOANS

GOLD LOAN

OTHERS
DATA FOR ONLY DIGITALLY
DISBURSED LOANS
SOURCE: RBI REPORT

RISING NEWEST
HOUSEHOLD DEBT
BNPL could create a debt
30.10% 31.70% 32.50% 37.30% LOAN CRAZE
culture in the long run IN TOWN
FIGURES ARE HOUSEHOLD DEBT
AS PERCENTAGE OF GDP 2017 -18 2018 -19 2019 -20 2020 -21
SOURCE: RBI

NBFC with Payments E-commerce

BNPL brand tie-ups companies companies with
VARIANTS (Bajaj Finance, (Paytm, tie-ups with banks
HDB and other MobiKwik) & NBFCs (Amazon, CURRENT SIZE

$3-3.5
NBFCs) Flipkart)

Loan cycle 3-24 months 0-12 months 3-48 months | 31

Processing fee / 0-6% `0-99 `0-10 BILLION
one-time charges
The market size of the BNPL
Late fees 0-4% per `0-750 `0-600 for the sector in India now is $3-3.5
month on EMI amount outstanding billion or `22,500-26,250 crore
outstanding from `100 to `5,000
plus
Bounce charges `450 2-3% of Depends on lending
outstanding partners
amount for
extension of due
date by a month
Interest rate Zero interest Zero interest up Zero interest up
to 15-30 days. For to 30 days. For
EMI option, 0-24% EMI option, 0-24%
depending on depending on
borrower’s profile borrower’s profile SIZE BY 2026
Other charges `36-46
for credit
bureau costs,
foreclosure
NA NA
$45-50
BILLION
and part
prepayment Estimated size of the market
charges
in 2026 will be $45-50 billion
or `3.37-3.75 lakh crore
Features are not for any specific company, but a general overview of the BNPL structure SOURCE: REDSEER

GLOBAL BNPL players Country Valuations Revenues

RISK Klarna Sweden $46 billlion $1,407 million
Size and scale Affirm US $31 billion $871 million
of global players
point to a AfterPay Australia $19 billion $595 million
systemic risk
Zip Australia $4 billion $282 million
SOURCE: BT RESEARCH Sezzle US $566 million $104 million

GRAPHICS BY RAHUL SHARMA

Business Today 23 January 2022

 COVER STORY — BNPL
also the gap in the ecosystem in terms of how
many people have access to credit,” sums up
Mehta of Freecharge. Besides, the prevalent
low-interest-rate regime also helps.
However, the very proliferation of BNPL
platforms has created its own problem. These
new borrowers are availing BNPL offers on
platforms without disclosing how many short-
term loans they have accumulated. “So, the
subsequent lender doesn’t know if there is a
problem in the behaviour of the customer,” says
a financial expert at a Big Four consultancy
firm. As a result, many new-to-credit borrowers
have multiple credit lines that ultimately result
in over-leveraging. Unsurprisingly, the delin-
quency rate in new-to-credit customers is high-
er than the average in an unsecured portfolio.
However, BNPL players defend themselves
by arguing that they are testing and experi-
menting with first-time borrowers by giving
them small loan limits. As they use and repay
the older loans, the platforms gradually make
these borrowers eligible for bigger loans, while
32 | weeding out the truants. And all the while, their
models are learning from the accumulated data.
All this, to get more eligible borrowers and
issue more loans. The huge influx of private equity
capital into the sector has forced BNPL companies to
aggressively build their portfolio to not only beat their
rivals but also satiate their investors. That means they
make it easy, way too easy, to get a loan. If you apply on
four or five different platforms, you can comfortably get
multiple loans totalling `1 lakh without any proof of in-
come and with minimal paperwork.
This is because BNPL players mainly rely on assess-
ing a borrower’s creditworthiness through the very nar-
row parameters of their e-commerce and e-payments
history. “We use analytics to understand a consumer’s
background and get insights into their purchasing be-
haviour to determine their spending limit and ensure
that they are not over-leveraged,” says Anup Agrawal,
business head of PayU-owned BNPL provider LazyPay.
S
o, how do they assess a customer’s intent
or ability to repay when there is scant data on
their income and savings? By data triangula-
tion. For instance, the platform compares a
customer’s residence address in the mandatory KYC
(know your customer) document and the delivery ad-
dress keyed into the shopping portal. If they are differ-
ent, it is red-flagged as a deliberate ploy to avoid pay-
ment. There are many other such factors in their digital
Business Today 23 January 2022
“Typically, the credit “While BNPL loans
limits in BNPL are initially see a higher
less than `25,000... delinquency rate
it is feasible to compared to standard
adequately measure credit products, over
and manage risk the long term,
[even for] new-to- they can perform
credit customers” equally well”
VIJAY MANI SRIRAM RAMNARAYAN
PARTNER, DELOITTE COUNTRY HEAD, INDIA AND
INDIA SOUTH-EAST ASIA BUSINESS,
CREDITAS SOLUTIONS
data armoury, claim BNPL players, to help check the
‘intent’ factor. “We have developed models that are ac-
curate, predictive, and far superior to something like
a credit bureau file because, by definition, on a new-
to-credit customer, the credit bureau file will be very,
very scant,” says Chapman of ZestMoney. In fact, BNPL
platforms say the past two pandemic years have helped
stress-test their underwriting models.
The small ticket sizes also make it easier for compa-
nies to carry out their risk assessment, says Vijay Mani,
Partner at Deloitte India. “Typically, the credit limits
in BNPL are less than `25,000. As a result of all these
factors, it is feasible to adequately measure and man-
age risk, even considering that BNPL is often associated
with new-to-credit customers,” he says.
However, the rising NPAs (non-performing assets) in
BNPL loan books indicate that while risk management
may be feasible, lenders are perhaps a little too relaxed
in their approach. “The NPA estimates show that the
delinquencies are in double digits in BNPL portfolios,
which indicates that the BNPL players are not doing a
great job of correctly assessing the creditworthiness,”
says the consultant. But they also explain, “BNPL is an
unsecured loan after all. Historically, the NPAs are high-
er in the unsecured segment.”
Besides, BNPL lenders start with small-ticket loans
and increase the limit only based on customer behav-
iour, adds Sriram Ramnarayan, Country Head, India
and South-East Asia Business, Creditas Solutions. “So,
while BNPL loans initially see a higher delinquency rate
compared to standard credit products, over the long
term, they can perform equally well,” he predicts.
But the risks in small-ticket lending are dispropor-
tionately higher. “If you look at credit bureau data, the
small-ticket lending has a pretty high risk compared to
a large-ticket lending business,” a credit bureau offi-
cial says on condition of anonymity. And won’t numer-
ous small credit transactions make it more difficult
for borrowers to keep a track of their total credit lines
and, therefore, to repay on time? Not quite, says Shilpa
Mankar Ahluwalia, who leads the fintech practice at
law firm Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas. “The size of
the loan is not really correlated to the risk of default,”
she says.
Chapman pitches in, saying there is a positive selec-
tion bias while selecting borrowers as BNPL platforms
work with merchants and within a transaction frame-
work. “You are not targeting credit-seeking customers
who are desperate for credit. Instead, you are working
alongside consumer durable brands and offering fi-
nance at the point of sale so that it leads to low risk,”
she reasons. In fact, BNPL players say they’re helping
people in smaller geographies test and cultivate their
creditworthiness before they graduate to the big-tick-
et home or auto loans. “A credit card
will rip them off whereas a BNPL
credit journey will help in creating
a good credit culture,” says a fin-
tech executive who did not want to
be identified as criticising another
loan product.
Experts, however, argue that
people from smaller towns and cit- BNPL PLAYERS
ies are too naive to understand the
implications of over-leveraging. But UNDERWRITE NEW
lending is only one side of the BNPL
coin; collection is the other equally BORROWERS BASED
important side. Banks and the larger
NBFCs have mastered this over the ON THEIR PAYMENT
years and have well-oiled collection
machinery. But unregulated entities HISTORY
or over-aggressive players can use
hard collections methods. There have been instances of
a few Chinese BNPL firms operating like local money-
lenders and deploying arm-twisting collection methods.
In fact, law enforcement agencies are investigating a few
of them after borrowers died by suicide in some cases.
There are also a host of other issues that catch first-
time borrowers unawares. These range from improper
or unclear disclosures on the interest terms to the lack
Business Today 23 January 2022
of a proper customer protection framework in some
regions.
All this cries out for stricter regulatory oversight, not
just to protect customers but also the economy.
C
learly, bnpl, an unsecured, small-ticket
loan product, is expanding in the unknown
territory of new credit borrowers in smaller
geographies. And if Indian BNPL players
grow to the size of some of their global counterparts,
there is a likely debt trap ahead for these borrowers.
India’s household debt to GDP has already grown
from 30 per cent in 2017-18 to 37 per cent in 2019-20,
even without the BNPL mania. But that debt is still sub-
stantially lower than in other major countries—the US
is at 77 per cent, whereas China is at 62 per cent. That
alone shows there is an opportunity for BNPL players to
help Indians accumulate debt. Indeed, it is necessary for
the economy, reasons Patel of LenDenClub. “If we are
aiming for a $5-trillion economy, some amount of debt
will have to be taken. No country has developed without
taking debt.”
But the staggering growth in the unsecured BNPL | 33
market could put the entire financial system at risk
down the line. Especially if platforms cut corners. There
are instances of companies not doing proper KYC docu-
mentation or credit bureau checks. Sometimes they
don’t even report a default to the credit bureau agencies.
“This kind of lax attitude could lead to over-leveraging,
which in turn increases the default rate, which also has
the potential to impact the entity and the entire ecosys-
tem,” says a retired banker on condition of anonymity.
This is exactly what happened in the wake of the 2008
financial crisis when many foreign lenders such as Citi-
 COVER STORY — BNPL

MAKINGS OF A TRAP
The rise in BNPL loans could be potentially
dangerous. Here’s why

financial and Fullerton had Afterpay, Klarna, PayPal,

to shutter their small-ticket, and Zip are already on the
unsecured loan business. radar of US regulators for
In India, these short- issues ranging from regu-
term loans are growing at latory arbitrage to data
a fast clip. At the system harvesting. The UK regu-
level, traditional banks lator is also exploring a
have less than 10 per cent of FOR BORROWERS 4 No stress testing regulatory framework for
their lending in unsecured of the loan the BNPL industry.
1 Availing loan for portfolio for
assets. Conversely, this consumption and higher interest
Back home, the Re-
number is very substantial discretionary rates or slowdown serve Bank of India (RBI)
purchases in the economy
for business models like recently came out with
small finance banks (SFBs), 2 No history of loan No focus on a working group paper
or credit bureau 5
NBFCs and fintechs. And collection and on digital lending, which
records recovery
unlike banks, these lend- also includes BNPL. “The
3 Availing multiple
ers don’t have a diversified BNPL products RBI working group has
FOR
book to absorb any NPA without realising clearly said that BNPL
REGULATORS
shocks. Mani of Deloitte, the implications can only be done by NBF-
though, argues that BNPLs Over-leveraging, 1 No verification Cs or licensed entities as
4 agency for digital
pose a lesser systemic risk creating a bad a balance sheet product,”
lending apps
bureau record for
than other digital lending future loans such 2 Flourishing illegal
says Ahluwalia of Shardul
products where there is low as home or auto digital lending Amarchand Mangaldas.
to no visibility on spends 5 Lack of financial Apps collecting The issue here is that the
3
34 | and where the value at risk literacy all kinds of entire BNPL ecosystem
is much greater. customer data of credit assessment,
FOR BNPL from apps
While some industry and social
consumer protection,
experts say the current eco- PLAYERS data privacy and payment
media, data
nomic environment isn’t 1 Not doing proper privacy issues recovery is outside the
KYC, which is
ideal to assess the perfor- dangerous 4 No reporting to banking system. More-
mance of BNPL players, credit bureaus, over, there isn’t much
2 Not checking bad credit culture
others say these platforms with bureaus
control over the disclo-
are not stress-testing their 5
No guidelines sure practices regarding
3 Chasing growth on disclosure
business models enough and boosting of annualised charges and interest rates
to manage worse circum- valuations interest rate at unregulated front-end
stances. The traditional companies.
banks and NBFCs have There is also the pos-
gone through many cycles sibility of BNPL firms
and understand the risk if sharing customer data
things go bust. On the other hand, BNPL players are yet without consent, or even selling data to third parties.
to see a full economic cycle, from boom to bust. How- What does one do in such cases? “An aggrieved borrow-
ever, it is for this very reason that one should not judge er should reach out to the customer support team of the
BNPL, says Ramnarayan of Creditas Solutions. “High solution provider who will be able to help them with the
growth and competition exist in sectors other than issue,” says Agrawal of LazyPay.
BNPL, but it doesn’t mean that players are compromis- For now, though, borrowers aggrieved by the tradi-
ing on credit standards. Let’s not hold a sector guilty be- tional lending system are reaching out to BNPL plat-
fore it has seen the light of the day,” he says. forms in hordes for credit. Its ease and mere availability
But that’s no reason for regulators to stay on the override their concerns, if any. Two months ago, fintech
sidelines, especially as non-bank entities such as e- BharatPe entered the fray with an interesting market-
commerce companies are offering BNPL options. ing tagline, “De Dena Aaram se.” That translates to “take
These companies, like Amazon Pay, have prepaid pay- your time in paying back”.
ment licences and partner with lenders at the back end Taking on debt never sounded more enticing.
to facilitate the loans. Globally, too, BNPL is giving
regulators a headache. Major players such as Affirm, @Teena_Kaushal, @anandadhikari

Business Today 23 January 2022

 ECONOMY — ALPHABET ECONOMICS

TRACKING THE PATTERN TAX POSITIVE

A comparison between YoY and QoQ GDP growth Revenue mop-up in 2021-22 looks to exceed
budget target by 15-20 per cent, providing
the government with spending buffer
25 20.1
YoY GDP GROWTH (%)
20

(83%)
NET TAX REVENUE (` CRORE) 12,00,000
15 Year-on-year
10 8.4 GDP growth 10,00,000
5.4 4.6 3.3 3 appears like

(20%)

(3%)
5 8,00,000

(4%)
0.5 1.6

(-16%)
a V-shaped
0 recovery… 6,00,000
-5
-7.4
-10 4,00,000

10,53,135
6,83,486

5,75,697
6,33,617

6,61,113
-15 2,00,000
-20
0
-25 -24.4 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21 2021-22
25 22.3
QoQ GDP GROWTH (%)
20
15
9.9 10
…but CAPEX DRIVE
7.5 sequential Pick-up in capital expenditure to act as a
10 6.2 plotting multiplier for growth
5 -0.1
1.3 suggests a

(28%)
0 3,00,000
W-shaped CAPEX (` CRORE)
-5 recovery 2,50,000
(14%)

-4.1
(-2%)

-10
(30%)

(9%)

-15 2,00,000
-16.9
-20 1,50,000
-25
-29.7 1,00,000
-30
2,53,270
2,01,273
1,62,795

1,77,099

1,97,355

50,000
Q1 FY20

Q2 FY20

Q3 FY20

Q4 FY20

Q1 FY21

Q2 FY21

Q3 FY21

Q4 FY21

Q1 FY22

Q2 FY22

0
2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21 2021-22

SOURCE: MOSPI FIGURES IN BRACKETS INDICATE GROWTH

SOURCE: CONTROLLER GENERAL OF ACCOUNTS

GRAPHICS BY RAHUL SHARMA

IS IT A V? IS IT A K? L? U? W? THE PATTERN OF INDIA’S ECONOMIC

RECOVERY HAS GOT INDIA’S TOP ECONOMISTS SEIZED IN A BIZARRE
GAME OF ALPHABET ECONOMICS. MEANWHILE, THERE’S ANOTHER
SHAPE THAT’S THREATENING TO PUT THE RECOVERY INTO AN ‘O’ LOOP.
IT’S CALLED OMICRON, AND IT COULD BE A NASTY CUSTOMER
By DILASHA SETH AND RAJAT MISHRA

Business Today 23 January 2022

CLIMBING UP EXPORTS RISE
India’s wholesale inflation touched a series high of 14.23% in November Exports look set to touch the $400-billion
target for the fiscal and were already at
$263 billion by November
CPI-WPI: DIVERGING INFLATIONARY PATHS (%) 400
15 14.23 EXPORTS ($ BILLION)
350
13.11
Inflation rising 300
11.57 11.8 12.54
12 on account 250
10.74 12.07 11.64 of high
200
commodity
9 and fuel 150
7.61 7.89 prices 100

400.00
330.00
302.84
274.60
6.93

291.80
313.36
6.3 6.26 50
6 5.03 5.52 5.3
4.59 4.48 0
5.59 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21 2021-22*
4.83 4.91
3 2.29 4.06 4.23 4.35 *TARGET FOR 2021-22
1.31 2.51 SOURCE:
1.95 DEPARTMENT OF
0 COMMERCE
OCT-20

NOV-20

DEC-20

JAN-21

FEB-21

MAR-21

APR-21

MAY-21

JUN-21

JUL-21

AUG-21

SEP-21

OCT-21

NOV-21

SOURCE: MINISTRY OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY

CONSUMER PRICE INFLATION WHOLESALE PRICE INFLATION

FM NIRMALA SITHARAMAN’S UPCOMING

BUDGET 2022-23 COULD BE AN OPPORTUNITY
FOR THE GOVERNMENT TO TAKE THE
ECONOMY INTO ACCELERATION MODE

PHOTOGRAPH BY BANDEEP SINGH

-0.5%
Year-on-year gross
60%
Capacity utilisation at
40%
Labour force
bank credit growth the aggregate level for participation rate
to micro and small manufacturing in Q1 of compared to 43 per
enterprises remained FY22, down from 69.4% cent before
negative in Oct 2021 in the previous quarter the pandemic

Business Today 23 January 2022

 T
ECONOMY — ALPHABET ECONOMICS
THERE’S A GAME afoot amongst
economists and all and sundry who
38 | are engaged in the matter of fore-
casting economic growth. It’s called
Alphabet Economics. And it’s about
predicting the shape of the GDP
growth rate curve, after the batter-
ing received at the hands of the Co-
vid-19 pandemic. Will it be a V? K?
L? U? Or a W? India’s former chief
economic advisor K.V. Subramanian
is betting big on a V-shaped revival,
while others including International
Monetary Fund (IMF) Chief Econo-
mist Gita Gopinath are calling it a
K-shaped one, indicating widening
inequality or uneven recovery. Even
the data indicates two alphabets—V
and W (see charts). Plotting sequen-
tial quarterly GDP growth shows a
W-shaped recovery (with two sharp
dips), but plotting annualised GDP
growth appears V-shaped, or as N.R.
Bhanumurthy, Vice Chancellor of
BASE University puts it—a smoking
pipe-shaped recovery.
Despite the downside risks from
the big O—the Omicron variant of
the coronavirus—most economists
believe that the worst may actually
be behind us. And that Finance Min-
ister Nirmala Sitharaman’s upcom-
ing Union Budget 2022-23 could be
an opportunity for the government
to take the economy into accelera-
tion mode with a targeted approach
for key sectors to boost consump-
tion, which remains weak.
Former chief statistician of
India Pronab Sen clearly sees
economic recovery taking the K
shape, indicating widening dis-
parity between large companies
and micro, small and medium en-
terprises (MSMEs), including the
informal segment. Weak demand
outlook due to depressed wages
and low employment will make
the economic recovery rickety go-
ing forward, he cautions. “The
upward-going tail of the K is cor-
porate India, which is doing very
well. The downward part of the K is
the rest of India, the non-corporate
and non-agriculture sector. That is
problematic. The MSMEs are the
employment generators and they
have suffered the most. Till that
sector starts picking up and wages
start picking up, the economy is
going to remain very fragile,” says PHOTOGRAPH BY CHANDRADEEP KUMAR
Sen, who is currently Country Di-
rector of International Growth
Centre, an economic think-tank.
The moratorium of six months a demand slump. “In this five-
(March-August 2020) by the Re- year period, the corporate sector
serve Bank of India (RBI) on term has taken up a large part of the mar-
loans announced as a Covid-19 ket share that these MSMEs used to
response did prevent the death of have,” says Sen. “Now, getting the
MSMEs momentarily, but did little to MSMEs back is not going to be easy;
help them survive longer due to corporates will fight to protect
their turf.” Aditi Nayar, Chief
Economist at ICRA, who esti-
mates the net loss to the econo-
my between FY21 and FY23 from
the pandemic at `39.3 lakh crore
`39.3
in real terms, also sees “a clear K-
shaped divergence amongst the
formal and informal parts of the
LAKH CRORE economy, and the large gaining at
Net loss to economy the cost of the small”.
between FY21 & FY23, The MSME stress is visible
as per experts from RBI’s data on bank credit as
well. The year-on-year gross bank
credit growth to micro and small
Business Today 23 January 2022
 A file photo of workers
at a footwear factory in
Bahadurgarh, Haryana

MANY
ECONOMISTS
AGREE THAT
MSMEs LOST
REVENUE
MARKET
SHARE TO
LARGE | 39
COMPANIES
DURING THE
PANDEMIC

enterprises remained negative at
-0.5 per cent in October 2021 for
the second straight month fol-
lowing two months of positive
growth. This compares with an 8.1
per cent growth in October 2020.
Comparatively, overall gross bank
credit was up 6.8 per cent, against
5.1 per cent in October 2021. Even
this nearly 7 per cent credit growth
is too low for an economy of India’s
size and growth rate, Reserve Bank
of India Governor Shaktikanta Das
said recently.
“It is gathered from the feed-
back from MSMEs that disruptions
caused by the Covid-19 pandemic
adversely impacted their earnings
by 20-50 per cent, and the micro
and small enterprises faced maxi-
mum heat, mainly due to reduction
in demand and liquidity crunch,”
says Pradeep Multani, President of
trade and industry body PHDCCI
(PHD Chamber of Commerce and
Industry). In contrast, the aggre-
gate earnings of Nifty companies
grew in double digits at 37 per cent
year-on-year in the second quarter
ended September, with revenues up
by 31 per cent. The bigger firms re-
portedly raised their revenue mar-
ket shares during the pandemic,
either through organic growth or
through mergers and acquisitions,
as per the Herfindahl-Hirschman
Index (HHI), which is a measure of
market concentration to determine
market competitiveness.
that sinking feeling
RBI Deputy Governor Michael Patra
recently said that credit demand was
still missing in the economy, largely
on account of “the very, very wide
output gap”, which according to him
“will take several years to close”.
(Output gap or capacity utilisation
is the gap between output capacity
and actual output.) Patra blamed it
on the missing private investment
and private demand, which he said
is due to the fact that corporates
were still facing surplus capacity
built over the years. According to
RBI data, capacity utilisation at the
aggregate level for manufactur-
ing declined to 60 per cent in Q1 of
FY22, from 69.4 per cent recorded in
the previous quarter. “With capac-
ity utilisation below 70 per cent for
the manufacturing sector, there is
little reason to invest. Which means

Business Today 23 January 2022

 ECONOMY — ALPHABET ECONOMICS
the economy is unlikely to get the
additional thrust needed from the
engines of private consumption and
investment,” says Dipti Deshpande,
Principal Economist, CRISIL.
With manufacturing not produc-
ing enough, labour force participa-
tion rate (or LPR, share of labour
force of the total working-age popu-
lation) has slumped to nearly 40 per
cent compared to 43 per cent before
the pandemic, according to the Cen-
tre for Monitoring Indian Economy
(CMIE). “The two pandemic shocks
have lowered the LPR structurally…
which is the most worrisome,” ac-
cording to the CMIE. Salaried jobs
fell by 6.8 million in November,
while the number of entrepreneurs
declined by 3.5 million. Devendra
Pant, Chief Economist at India Rat-
ings, says the falling wage growth
and reduced household savings not
40 | only impact consumption but also
interest rates in the economy. “Un-
less the household sector revives,
it will be difficult for the economy
to sustain high economic growth in
the medium- to long run,” says Pant.
Posting 8.4 per cent growth in
the second quarter, the absolute
GDP marginally surpassed the pre-
Covid-19 level of FY2019-20 by 0.3
per cent in Q2. However, for the first
half of 2021-22, the economy was
still 4.4 per cent lower than the cor-
responding period of FY2019-20.
Also, 13 high-frequency indica-
tors show uneven recovery. Seven
indicators exceeded pre-Covid-19
levels in October-November 2021,
including goods and services tax
e-way bill generation (26.7 per
cent higher), non-oil exports (26
per cent higher), rail freight traffic
(20.2 per cent), Coal India output
(15.7 per cent), electricity genera-
tion (9.9 per cent), petrol consump-
tion (6.4 per cent), and ports cargo
traffic (4 per cent). However, the
remaining six indicators were low-
er than pre-Covid-19 levels. These
include scooter production (-25.1
“We are maintaining
our forecast of 9%
GDP expansion in
FY22, with K-shaped
divergence amongst
the formal and
informal parts of
the economy”
ADITI NAYAR
CHIEF ECONOMIST,
ICRA RATINGS
“It is, in fact, a K
shape. The upward-
going tail of the K
is corporate India,
which is doing very
well. The downward
part of the K is the
rest of India”
PRONAB SEN
COUNTRY DIRECTOR,
INTERNATIONAL
GROWTH CENTRE
“The upcoming
Budget is the
right time for the
government to focus
on the medium-term
growth targets.
They have to bring
back the $5-trillion
economy discussion”
N.R. BHANUMURTHY
VICE CHANCELLOR,
DR B.R. AMBEDKAR SCHOOL OF
ECONOMICS UNIVERSITY
Business Today 23 January 2022
per cent), domestic airline passen-
ger traffic (-22.8 per cent), vehicle
registration (-22.8 per cent), diesel
consumption (-6.8 per cent), pas-
senger vehicle production (-3.1 per
cent) and motorcycle production
(-2.6 per cent). “This suggests that
the recovery is yet to broad-base,”
says Nayar of ICRA.
route to recovery
Deshpande of CRISIL points out
that the bigger impetus to growth
will continue to be government in-
vestment and exports. “Therefore,
the overall pick-up in GDP growth
will be gradual, unlike the years
when private consumption was
the driver. To be sure, as restric-
tions ease, vaccination rates rise
and the economy picks up, private
consumption should improve. The
pace, however, won’t be as much as
needed because of ongoing slack-
ness in private consumption,” says
Deshpande. The private final con-
sumption expenditure, signifying
demand in the economy, grew by
8.6 per cent in Q2 year-on-year,
but was 3.5 per cent lower than the
2019-20 levels, according to the
National Statistical Office (NSO).
The public administration, defence
and other services component re-
ported a 17.4 per cent growth dur-
ing the quarter compared to 5.8 per
cent in Q1, reflecting an increase in
government spending to support
economic revival.
There are some positive indica-
tors, too. A whopping 83 per cent
growth in revenue mop-up in the
first seven months of the current
fiscal has provided the government
significant buffer to spend and sup-
port economic revival. Capital ex-
penditure, which acts as a growth
multiplier, has grown by 28 per cent
in the April to October period, a
four-year high. “We expect tax col-
lections to exceed the budget target
by around 15 per cent,” says an of-
ficial in the finance ministry, who
wished to remain anonymous.
Then, strong exports have held
up economic recovery this year. “We
expect to reach $400-420 billion [in
exports] and, in fact, what has been
reassuring is that the order book-
ing position of Indian exporters is
pretty good,” says Ajay Sahai, Direc-
tor General and CEO of Federation
of All India Export Organisations
(FIEO). “That is why we are hopeful
that the trend will continue in the
next year also.”
RBI’s bi-monthly consumer
confidence survey for the October-
November 2021 period showed that
demand remained in the “pessimis-
tic terrain”. The current situation
index, which is current perception
compared to the year-ago
period, improved to 62.3 in
November 2021 from 57.7 in
September, after touching a
low of 48.6 in July. The rise
was largely due to higher
consumer spending, but
pessimism continued on
price levels, employment,
economic situation and
income. (A reading below
100 denotes pessimism and
above 100 indicates opti-
mism.) The index for one-
year-ahead expectations
rose to 109.6 in November
from 107 in September,
buoyed by higher optimism
for household income and employ-
ment scenario.
threats on the way
First threat: the big O. Says Pant of
India Ratings: “Omicron has added
to the list of uncertainties. Delhi has
already announced measures limit-
ing mobility, leading to curtailed
demand. If these kind of measures
are announced by other states and
remain in force for a longer time, it
will affect consumption and growth
in the fourth quarter of the cur-
rent fiscal.” Former chief statisti-
cian Sen points out that a lot of the
economic recovery will depend on
the policy response to Omicron.
“The second Covid-19 wave has
taught us that if you enforce lock-
downs strategically rather than
across the board, it is much less dis-
ruptive and not all supply chains get
locked up,” he says.
But there are other caveats, too.
Inflationary concerns are expect-
ed to keep demand muted. India’s
wholesale inflation touched a series
high of 14.23 per cent in November
and is expected to remain in double
digits for the next few months on
account of rupee depreciation, el-
evated international crude oil prices
and, well, Omicron fears-led global
RBI’S BI-MONTHLY
CONSUMER CON-
FIDENCE SURVEY
FOR THE OCT-
NOV 2021 PERIOD
SHOWED THAT DE-
MAND REMAINED
IN THE ‘PESSIMIS-
TIC TERRAIN’
supply-chain disruption. Mean-
while, CPI inflation touched a three-
month high of 4.91 per cent in the
same month. Households expect-
ed inflation to harden in the near
and medium term, as per the RBI’s
household inflation expectation
survey. The proportion of respon-
dents expecting higher inflation
in the next three months and over
the year-ahead rose in November
2021. The inflation expectation for
the next three months rose by a steep
150 basis points and that for the year-
ahead period rose by 170 basis points.
Business Today 23 January 2022
Meanwhile, non-oil, non-gold
imports slowed to $31.82 billion in
November, down 11 per cent com-
pared to October, indicating slow-
ing domestic demand. Besides, a
weaker rupee will only make im-
ports more expensive. The rupee
has depreciated by 1.9 per cent in Q3
against the US dollar with central
banks globally having started in-
creasing interest rates.
“Given that inflation can be a drag
on demand, investment should pick
up largely driven by the government.
In this context, the slew of infra-
structure projects undertaken by the
government, notably the Gati Shakti
project, inland waterways, textile
parks, among others, bode well for
India’s growth,” says Arun Singh,
Global Chief Economist, Dun
& Bradstreet.
At this point, GDP growth
in FY22 is certain, but it’s go- | 41
ing to be a tough grind. In
December, Fitch Ratings cut
India’s economic growth
forecast to 8.4 per cent from
8.7 per cent projected earlier
for the current fiscal, saying
the rebound after the second
wave of Covid-19 infections
has been more subdued than
expected. Other agencies
such as the IMF, Goldman
Sachs, and the World Bank
also predict 8-9 per cent GDP
growth for FY22. And econo-
mists such as Pant of India Ratings
and Nayar of ICRA expect growth
rate of around 9 per cent for FY22.
Consider this. The last five fiscal
years have delivered GDP growth
rates of 8.26 per cent (FY17), 6.8 per
cent (FY18), 6.53 per cent (FY19),
4.04 per cent (FY20), and minus
7.96 per cent (FY21). By that mea-
sure, anything between 8 per cent
and 9 per cent in FY22 will still be
the best in recent times. No matter
the shape of the curve.
@dilasha, @RajatMishra9518
ARRANGED
MEDIA — ZEE-SONY

MARRIAGE
By KRISHNA GOPALAN

Circumstances broker a coupling of Zee and Sony,

two companies with distinctly different cultures
and strengths. As they unite for a new future, they
still face several hurdles, including an upset
Invesco, Zee’s largest investor, and their own
contradictions. The real challenge for the new
mates has only just begun

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE COMING TOGETHER OF ZEE AND SONY
PICTURES NETWORKS INDIA WILL CREATE ONE OF THE BIGGEST
PLAYERS IN INDIA’S ENTERTAINMENT SPACE

With combined
revenues of
$1.79 billion,
the Zee-Sony merged
entity will be the
second largest in the
general entertain- COMPLEMENTING
EACH
ment business— The two players
after Star & can now look at
Disney India upping the game

OTHER
in OTT, a
business that is
big on capex, with
the opportunity
to create content
that can last for
many years

The merger finally

gives Sony a
presence in India’s
regional market
where it is
insignificant

There is no overlap in
the businesses of Zee
and Sony. In fact,
they are quite
For Zee, it now has complementary
a real chance with
cricket since it
has the backing
from Sony

Business Today 23 January 2022

 I
MEDIA — ZEE-SONY
IT HAS BEEN a busy 12 months for Punit Goenka. Sit-
ting in his spacious room in Zee Entertainment Enterpris-
es’ central Mumbai office, the relief on his face is palpable.
44 | He has just signed a deal to merge Zee, where Goenka is the
MD & CEO, with Sony Pictures Networks India. Though
the deal was in the making for over a year—as is normal
in M&As—valuation was a contentious issue. With a com-
bined revenue of $1.79 billion, this would be the second
largest entertainment network after Star & Disney India,
which has revenues of $1.8 billion, a shade more than the
new entity. Importantly, the Zee-Sony entity will have 75
channels and a strong presence in entertainment, sports
and regional markets, making it a serious player.
The sequence of events that led to the deal is quite apt
for two companies that create content from such story-
lines for a living. The first move was made by Sony in No-
vember 2020, but that offer was not acceptable to Goen-
ka. Things started moving about three months later
when KPMG reached out to him on behalf of Sony with
a better valuation. By August 2021, he was in the thick
of it. “I was in London on holiday, but constantly on the
phone with my team back here to thrash out the deal,”
reveals Goenka. Why was Sony interested? N.P. Singh,
MD & CEO of Sony Pictures Networks India, says his
company wanted to expand its footprint. “For a while,
we had discussed the possibility of doing something
with Zee. Once we were clear, I took it to my bosses.”
The basic contours were agreed on, and a board meet-
ing was scheduled for October. All hell broke loose when
Invesco, the Atlanta-based investment management firm
that holds an 18 per cent stake in Zee, accused it of corpo-
rate mis-governance. (Invesco did not respond to queries
from Business Today.) Goenka and the promoters (Zee
Business Today 23 January 2022
was started by his father, Subhash Chandra), with just 4
per cent stake, had limited say. “I told Sony about what
was going on and left the decision to them,” he admits.
On September 22, Zee announced its plans to merge
with Sony, and the deal was inked three months later. In
the merged entity, Sony will hold a 50.86 per cent stake,
while the promoters of Zee will hold 3.99 per cent. The re-
maining 45.15 per cent will be with Zee’s other sharehold-
ers. However, this is merely the beginning of what will
be a long process: getting approvals at several levels; Zee
having to deal with an angry Invesco, its largest share-
holder; and the fact that both entities need each other in
a challenging scenario, where growth is hard to come by.
A TALE OF TWO EMBATTLED FIRMS
Both the companies have been on a difficult wicket
lately. Zee struggled with hard questions from Invesco,
with Zee’s promoters having limited bargaining power
(see Diminishing Stake). Plus, with a hefty debt (around
`11,000 crore at the group holding company level), there
was only so much Zee could do. A deal with Viacom18
was also considered but fell through. “Sony has come in
as the white knight in this case,” says Vivek Menon, Man-
aging Partner at NV Capital, a media and entertainment
credit fund. To him, Goenka’s experience in broadcast-
ing (he took over as MD & CEO in 2008) is useful, more
so given that “he learnt the ropes from his father”.
Not all is well at Sony, too, here in India. Till 2017, the
network had the broadcast rights to the Indian Premier
League (IPL), the country’s marquee cricket tournament.
Between FY15 and FY18, its revenue almost doubled from
`3,342 crore to `6,277 crore, while net profit shot up 6x.
But in September 2017, Star & Disney India (then Star In-
dia) bagged the IPL broadcasting rights, and Sony’s rev-
enue stagnated (`5,640 crore in FY21), while net profit
dropped to `564 crore from `976 crore in FY20.
For a broadcasting network, only a handful of chan-
nels brings in the revenue. In the case of Sony, according
to its annual report for FY21 sourced from the Registrar
of Companies (its Indian operations are unlisted), 46 per
cent of its revenue comes from advertising (that means
`2,563 crore), with subscription’s contribution being 42
per cent (`2,329 crore) and the rest coming primarily
from licensing. Here is where one needs to take a closer
look at the advertising revenue figures. The company’s
flagship channel, Sony Entertainment Television, point
out industry trackers, brings in around `1,000 crore each
year (Zee’s primary channel, Zee TV, also makes that
kind of money), while Sony SAB and Sony Max garner
approximately `450 crore and `375 crore, respectively.
Says Karan Taurani, Senior Vice President, Elara
Capital: “It has been a difficult phase for the television
broadcasting industry. The rapid shift towards digital
advertising and overhang of the new tariff order will
restrict subscription revenue growth. While the re-
gional pie is growing in double digits, the correspond-
 ing number for Hindi general entertainment is in the
low- to mid-single digits.” The real rub: Sony has neg-
ligible regional presence—one channel each in Bengali
and Marathi—and together their revenue is less than
`100 crore each year. “The regional story has been dis-
appointing for Sony and that is where they need Zee
quite badly. What Zee has done in the south or Ben-
gali or Marathi through organic growth is impressive,”
says a rival broadcaster.
In addition, investment bankers point out that the
folks at Sony saw merit in going with an entrepreneur-
driven culture. “The owners have been hands on at Zee
and that is the only way to make money in India’s broad-
casting business. The professionals-led approach ad-
opted by Sony and Star always comes with limitations,”
says an investment banker on condition of anonymity.
CRICKET HOLDS THE KEY
Goenka is clear that a cricket strategy is needed today.
“If you want to be in a position of leadership in digital,
you need sports, and within that cricket is a must,” he
says. Making a demarcation in the audience profile, he
emphasises that early adopters of digital are the youth.
“The female audience and the older generation will take
the linear [television broadcasting] path. If we want to
get the youngsters, sports is the way to do it.”
To his mind, nothing changes when it comes to Zee
being a content company. “That is irrespective of the
platform and we have to own it. This is where OTT be-
comes critical,” he maintains. Of the three large televi-
sion screens in his room, two play a live feed while the
other is reserved for OTT viewing.
In the first quarter of FY22, a webinar was organised

VOLATILE HISTORY DIMINISHING STAKE

The Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd stock has The promoter shareholding in Zee has shrunk
underperformed the Sensex in recent years drastically over the years
250 50
43.07
BSE Sensex
200 40
| 45
150 30

100
20

50
10
3.99
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd
0
0
Jan 1,

Dec 22,
2016

2021

DEC ’15 SEP ’21

VALUES REBASED TO 100; DATA TILL DECEMBER 22, 2021 TOTAL SHAREHOLDING OF PROMOTER AND PROMOTER
SOURCE: ACE EQUITY GROUP (IN PER CENT); SOURCE: ACE EQUITY

THE SHAREHOLDING STRUCTURE THE OVERALL What the two firms offer and what

Shareholding in the two firms, and the picture post the merger
PICTURE the combined entity will look like

Zee Sony Pictures

ZEE ENTERTAINMENT SPNI Genre Entertainment Networks India Merged entity
ENTERPRISES LTD TRANSFEREE
(ZEEL) COMPANY Hindi GEC 6 5 11
LISTED
IN INDIA Hindi movies 9 4 13
3.99%
ZEEL promoters Sports 10 10
3.99%
96.01% ZEEL
ZEEL public shareholders RE FIN promoters Regional 25 2 27
GRAPHICS BY RAHUL SHARMA

TU
45.15%
AL
NT S RUC

English 9 4 13
ZEEL public
STRUCT

SONY GROUP shareholders

T

Kids 1 1
CORP.
50.86% Total number of
100% Sony Group channels 49 26 75
RE

Bangla Entertainment
UR
Corp.
Pvt. Ltd Overall all-India
R E
17% 10%
CU
network share
100%
Sony Pictures Networks OTT platforms ZEE5 SonyLIV
India Private Limited (SPNI) SOURCE:
COMPANY, EMKAY
RESEARCH SOURCE: EMKAY RESEARCH

Business Today 23 January 2022

 MEDIA — ZEE-SONY

for analysts and a few investors. It gave the participants a

chance to get up and close with Goenka on how he viewed
the business. In this session, he spoke openly on how the
broadcasting story for Zee was in place. “But we need to
crack the OTT game. My organisation has people working
in silos and to integrate them is the only way to bring down
costs,” he told the gathering at the time. According to one
participant, Goenka opened up on options such as charging
for micro content, which could be, for instance, a musical
show. Here, the consumer pays only for specific content in-
stead of getting locked into a plan.
“The impression a lot of us got was that a new digital plat-
form was in the works. The non-compete fee (where Sony
is paying Zee’s promoters `1,100 crore, with that amount
‘WE WANT TO GET to be used by Zee to retain its original 3.99 per cent stake in

THE BUSINESS
the merged entity; see ‘We Want to Get the Business Back on
Track’) in all likelihood is being paid for this,” says the per-
BACK ON TRACK’
Zee Entertainment Enterprises’ MD &
CEO Punit Goenka speaks on some key
aspects of the merger. Edited excerpts:
By KRISHNA GOPALAN
 Have you spoken this work?
46 | to Invesco about the The emotional tag
proposed merger? of being the largest
The matter is sub- shareholder was over
judice and we have not in 2019. We are aware
discussed it. We want a of our status of being a
“For a while, we had discussed the
resolution to the issue. minority shareholder possibility of doing something with
We do not have a prob- and the objective is to Zee. Once we were clear, I took
lem and it was they bring stability back it to my bosses”
who went to court. to the business. I still
think like an entrepre- N.P. SINGH
 Tell us about the neur regardless of how MD & CEO, Sony Pictures Networks India
non-compete clause much I hold.
with Sony.
The non-compete  What about the
agreement was a part proposed increase in son quoted above. He explains that Zee understands distri-
of the deal. The Zee your shareholding to bution in broadcasting but not in OTT. “Netflix and Amazon
promoters will get 20 per cent? are the best here. With the merger, Sony will want to build
an additional 2 per It is not a priority for on Zee’s digital platform and that is why they need Goenka.”
cent stake in line with the moment. The most In just about a month from now, the bidding for the
this, which will be important thing is to five-year (2023-27) broadcasting rights for the IPL will get
transferred by Sony. get the business back to under way, for which Star & Disney India had forked out
This transfer is in lieu its days of glory. With `16,348 crore for 2018-22. That amount was twice as much
of Zee’s promoters not our shareholding of 4 as what Sony had paid for 2008-17. Even the most conser-
entering into a con- per cent, our board seat vative bet on the street suggests that it will easily get past
flicting business. remains intact. I will be `30,000 crore this time. Goenka says Zee will bid indepen-
the MD & CEO of the dently since the merger is still in the works. “We will be
 From a clear ma- merged entity report- prudent about our bid,” he says. Recently, Zee returned to
jority holding in Zee, ing to the board. Sony sports broadcasting by acquiring the global media rights
you hold just 4 per will have a majority of for the upcoming UAE T20 league for a 10-year period (the
cent today. How will members on the board. amount paid out was about $100-120 million). Sony’s Singh

Business Today 23 January 2022

says, “We will certainly evaluate the IPL. After all, we
were the first to take a bet on the tournament.”
It is expected that Star & Disney India, too, will be
there, although all eyes are on Mukesh Ambani’s Jio,
which, with its large telecom base, is expected to be very
aggressive. His broadcasting network, Viacom18, has no
cricket now and needs it badly. Elara’s Taurani thinks
Zee may not be that aggressive. “Being a listed company,
it cannot afford a situation where a big-ticket investment
fails to deliver value to shareholders. A higher acquisition
cost will negatively impact profitability. This may enable
Disney or Jio to aggressively bid for the IPL,” he says. With
an assured audience cutting across age groups, there is a
lot a broadcaster can gain through the IPL. Much as the
rights for the ICC (including the World Cup across for-
mats) and BCCI (for all cricket played in India) too come
up later, nothing is quite as important as the IPL.
“It would be imprudent of Invesco
to vote against the merger, which
will result in a new direction for the
company as a media leader”
SHRIRAM SUBRAMANIAN
Founder & Managing Director, InGovern
THE FINAL MARRIAGE
The Zee-Sony merger is a complex affair. Goenka ex-
pects it to be completed around August 2022. There are
many layers to this and a big one is Invesco, whose ap-
peals against Zee are pending in the National Company
Law Tribunal (NCLT) and Bombay High Court. Avanti T.
Chandele, Partner, Mind Legal, says: “Under the Compa-
nies Act, 2013, a scheme of arrangement is to be approved
by 75 per cent votes cast in its favour.” She thinks Invesco
may request for a stay on the merger process. “Under
Section 230 of the Companies Act, shareholders with at
least a 10 per cent stake may object to the merger and that
could be an area of concern. However, to stall the merger,
Invesco would need at least one-fourth of the sharehold-
ing, which they may not be able to muster,” she says.
According to Chandele, Zee and Sony will have to file
Business Today 23 January 2022
a detailed notice with the Competition Commission of
India since the merger has the potential to create market
dominance. “The approval from the Ministry of Informa-
tion and Broadcasting will also be required apart from
the stock exchanges and SEBI.” Further, NCLT may take
6-12 months to adjudicate upon the merger.
So, where does that leave Invesco and its case? Shri-
ram Subramanian, Founder & Managing Director at
InGovern, a proxy advisory firm, says in the absence
of an alternate plan, “it would be imprudent of In-
vesco to vote against the merger, which will result in
a new direction for the company as a media leader and
subsidiary of an MNC”. He is clear that, as the largest
shareholder, Invesco would do itself and other inves-
tors more damage than good if the merger does not go
through. “Information that was made available in the
past couple of months point to the fact that they were
| 47
“Under the Companies Act, 2013, a
scheme of arrangement [the merger]
is to be approved by 75 per cent
votes cast in its favour”
AVANTI T. CHANDELE
Partner, Mind Legal
comfortable with similar deal structures. The legal
cases only benefit the lawyers and are a distraction for
management and investors.”
Every large M&A deal is ironic in more ways than one.
In September 2016, Zee sold its sports network busi-
ness (the Ten Sports portfolio) to Sony for $385 million
at a handsome return—this was originally bought from
Dubai’s Taj Group for $107 million. “Internally, we kept
joking that it would come back to us. Today, it has,” says
Goenka. Indeed it has, but there is a lot of work to do for
both the entities in a scenario that is vastly different from
the past. Zee and Sony will be only too aware of that.
The future, then, will be full of hope and trepidation in
equal measure.
@krishnagopalan
 Apple India Continue

APPLE’S
INDIA
AFTER YEARS OF
LANGUISHING ON THE
FRINGES, APPLE HAS FINALLY
MADE ITS PRESENCE FELT IN
INDIA WITH RECORD SALES
AND MARKET SHARE OVER
THE PAST TWO YEARS. BUT
HAS ITS WINNING STRATEGY
48 | TO EFFECT THE TURNAROUND
SET IT UP WELL TO MINT
FURTHER GAINS?

S
BY ARNAB DUT TA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY NIL ANJAN DAS

INCE SUMIT VIJ laid his reviews from my friends, I pur-

hands on a MacBook Air for the
first time in 2009, his business
has grown manifold and the
Delhi-based entrepreneur has
bought almost the entire Apple
products line-up. But when
Apple introduced its new Mac
portfolio built on the in-house
M1 chipset last year, he had to
get it. After using several Apple
products, across generations,
Vij was already a satisfied Apple
loyalist. Yet, the new Mac’s
“unprecedented” performance
surprised him.
“After getting positive
chased the base model MacBook
Air from the new Apple India
online store. Not only was the
buying experience seamless,
but the performance of this new
Mac is way above anything I have
experienced before. This offers
more value for money than any
other computer I have purchased
in the past 10 years,” he says.
Now Vij can edit ultra-HD videos
on the base model Mac, for which
he earlier needed Pro models that
cost double the amount. For him,
this innovation is another reason
to stick to the brand.

Business Today 23 January 2022

 | 49

Business Today 23 January 2022


MISSION INDIA
Apple CEO Tim Cook visited India in
2016 and put in place a strategy to
put the company on the growth path
50 |
Vij is not alone. If the numbers
are anything to go by, there are thou-
sands of Indians whom Apple has
managed to attract and bring under
its fold in the past two years.
Bolstered by a spurt in demand
for its iPhones, MacBooks and iPads
as the Covid-19 pandemic forced
people to work and study remotely,
Apple India has delivered record-
breaking numbers. Its operating rev-
enue in India surged 68 per cent to a
record `22,845 crore in FY21, while
net profit rose 32 per cent to `1,226
crore. The revenue growth rate was
not only a nine-year-high but came
Apple India
THE LOCAL FACTOR
The iPhone SE (1st Gen) was the first model to be made in India;
since then, a number of models have been made in the country
Begins local
procurement of…
2017 iPhone SE (1st Gen)
2018 iPhone 6S
2019 iPhone 7 & XR
2020 iPhone 11 & SE (2nd Gen)
2021 iPhone 12
2022^ iPhone 13
^Estimates
as other consumer elec-
tronics firms just about
managed to hold fort. For
example, its arch-rival
Samsung India’s operat-
ing revenue remained flat
at `75,886 crore in FY21.
Apple’s stellar per-
formance of late is best
reflected in how the
iPhone has ground out
a bigger share of India’s
highly competitive and
price-sensitive smart-
phone market. Apple sold
3.2 million iPhones in
2020, equalling its 2017
record and giving it a 2.13
per cent market share, according to
CyberMedia Research (CMR). The
research agency estimates Apple will
sell over 5 million iPhones in 2021,
notching a record-high 3.5 per cent
market share.
Apple’s fortunes in the personal
computer (PC) and tablet market
also turned last year. Robust demand
for its Mac portfolio helped it break
into the top five for the first time
ever, with its market share exceeding
2 per cent in 2020 and crossing 5 per
cent in January-September 2021. Ap-
ple made a sizeable dent in the tablet
market, which is predominantly the
Business Today 23 January 2022
Continue
iPhone’s share
Share of Made-
in smartphone
in-India iPhones
exports from India
5% 0
17% 0
30% 0
60% 2%
77% 5%
80% -
Source: Industry
playground of low-priced products,
only in late-2020, CMR data shows.
It surprised many by capturing a 29
per cent market share in the first
three months of 2021, dislodging
Samsung and trailing only Lenovo.
It has since slipped to the No. 3 spot,
but CMR estimates Apple will end
2021 with a 22 per cent market share,
eclipsing its previous best of 17 per
cent in 2020.
“Driven by unprecedented
consumer demand arising from
work-from-home, learn-from-home
and unwind-at-home requirements,
Apple has seen a strong uptick for its
devices,” says Prabhu Ram, Head,
Industry Intelligence Group, CMR.
However, this was not always
the case.
Apple’s India story is over two
decades old. But its portfolio of
premium products, adorned with
the famous bitten-apple logo, kept
it on the fringes of the consumer
electronics market, while the likes
of Xiaomi, Samsung, vivo and Oppo
dominated the smartphone market,
and HP Inc., Dell, Lenovo, Acer and
Asus lorded over the PC market.
India was a market that Apple could
not ignore. But there was little it
could, or did, do. Until 2016.
Around that time, India had
 In 2021, Apple has logged With a user base of over
high double-digit volume 50 million, Apple is just
growth over the past getting started with its
year’s record sales ‘ecosystem’ in India

EYE ON
INDIA
Its revenue in Apple has
India is at an managed to
all-time high; enter the top
league in the Apple’s brand value
revenue jumped
68 per cent in PC market for had not translated
FY21, the highest the first time into sales in value-
jump since FY12 in 2021 with its conscious India. But
MacBooks not anymore

At an estimated The upcoming In tablets, its

5-million-plus Apple Store— iPads are setting
units, iPhone set to open at new records with
shipments in Mumbai’s BKC in a 22 per cent | 51
2021 are set to 2022—will add market share,
break all previous more firepower to beating its
records its India strategy previous best of
17 per cent

become the second-largest smart-
phone market, displacing the US and
trailing China. And its double-digit
volume growth was unmatched by
any other large market. But Apple’s
local business was plateauing, its
revenue growth stagnating. On
the other hand, Xiaomi went from
strength to strength despite enter-
ing India only two years prior. The
other Chinese brands and Samsung
were also making hay in a booming
smartphone market. This worried
Apple’s CEO Tim Cook enough to
make his maiden visit to the country
in May 2016. He held a series of
meetings with the who’s who of the
industry and the administration to
set Apple’s ship back on course.
Apple’s new navigation strategy
included three broad domestic ports
of call. The first was to start assem-
bling and manufacturing iPhones
locally, dovetailing with the ‘Make in
India’ programme the government
was promoting heavily. The second
was to start expanding its retail
presence—partly in response to
other smartphone makers carpet-
bombing the nation with physical
stores—and open its flagship Apple-
branded online and offline stores
down the line. The last was to gain
market share by lowering prices, ei-
ther through domestic manufactur-
ing or by sacrificing margins.
“India has been a growth market
for nearly a decade now, but the ap-
proach towards India has changed in
the past few years. In recent times, it
has become one of the key strategic
markets for Apple. It was also the
period when a growing number of
Indian consumers were getting ac-
customed to premium products,” a
company official says on condition of
anonymity as the person is not autho-
rised to speak to the media. “Stream-
lining” prices and improving product
availability outside of metropolises
were important aspects of Apple’s
India strategy, the official adds.
Slowly but surely Apple executed
its plans and, as is evident, they have
borne fruit in the past couple of
years. In fact, Apple’s record-setting
FY21 is only the start. The stage, say
industry experts, is set for Apple’s
revenue to jump at least 50 per cent
in FY22.

Business Today 23 January 2022

 RISING REVENUES RECORD
Apple’s India revenue has surged 68 per cent in FY21 NUMBERS
2021 will see the

22,845
highest-ever iPhone shipments
and market share in India
Operating revenue
Net profit
Figures in ` crore 3.5
2.56
2.13

13,623
13,049
11,619
1.2 1.25

10,538
>5
9,937

3.2 3.2
1.7 1.9
6,473
4,500

2017 2018 2019 2020 2021E*

3,058

1,226
896.3

926.2
2,004

373.4
294.3

262.3
242.9
311.5

119.5
112.7
620
59

FY11 FY12 FY13 FY14 FY15 FY16 FY17 FY18 FY19 FY20 FY21 Shipments Market share

Source: Registrar of Companies, *Estimates by CMR; shipments in million units;

Ministry of Corporate Affairs market share in per cent Source: CMR

52 | GRAPHICS BY ASIT ROY

Indeed, Cook’s recent comments then newly launched iPhone 12 were that made Apple handsets. Apple
indicate Apple has only gained mo- the top-selling premium handsets, sold 3.2 million phones in India in
mentum in this fiscal. “During fiscal helping the company capture nearly a 2017, of which about 5 per cent were
2021, we earned nearly one-third of third of the premium market (above sourced locally, according to indus-
our revenue from emerging markets the `37,000 price band), per IDC. try estimates.
and doubled our business in India,” The strong iPhone sales in that Since then, Apple has steadily
he said during an earnings call in quarter were because while the grown its domestic portfolio to
October. The Cupertino, California- iPhone 12 was imported at the time, include newer models, including the
based company follows an October- the lion’s share of the iPhone 11 iPhone 6S (in 2018), 7 and XR (in
September fiscal year, meaning the and other models sold then was as- 2019), 11 and SE 2nd generation (in
second half of its FY21 corresponds sembled in India. And that, in turn, 2020) and 12 (in 2021). And while its
with the first six months of Apple was the result of meticulous plan- overall handset sales were patchy un-
India’s FY22. ning and execution over the past few til the past two years, an increasing
What’s more astonishing is that years. And Cook’s visit. percentage of the phones it sold were

W
Apple’s growth, albeit off a lower sourced locally. Nearly 80 per cent of
base, is contrary to market trends. the estimated 5 million-plus iPhones
For example, Apple notched a 68 per ithin a year of Apple sold in 2021 were assembled
cent jump in iPhone sales in 2020, Cook’s departure in India—in line with its domestic
benefitting from the rebound in from Delhi in 2016, rivals, who procure more than 75 per
demand during the second half of Apple began rolling cent of their smartphones locally, per
the year. But market leaders Xiaomi out the first batch industry estimates.
and Samsung sold fewer phones of Made-in-India iPhones. The The most crucial benefit of
last year, leading to a 2 per cent slide attractively priced iPhone SE (1st local manufacturing is that the
in market-wide sales, according to generation) models were not only phones are much cheaper than
research firm IDC. Apple’s gains Apple’s first locally made phones but imported ones. Take the iPhone 12,
continued in the first three months also got India into an exclusive club for instance, which Apple recently
of 2021, when the iPhone 11 and the of three, including China and Brazil, added to its Made in India portfolio.

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE MAC EFFECT
Apple entered the top 5
among PC makers
for the first time in 2021
Q1, 2021 Q2, 2021
HP 32.9 (102) 33.6 (54)
Dell 21.8 (45) 22.1 (86)
Lenovo 20.1 (73) 17.8 (-3)
Acer 7.7 (10) 8.7 (32)
Apple 5.4 (336) 4.7 (229)
Asus 5.4 (84) 4.7 (40)
Figures indicate market share in per cent; figures in brackets are YoY
change in per cent; NA: Not available
Industry estimates show Apple cut
the landing cost by about 22 per cent
by assembling the phone locally. As
a result, Apple slashed prices on the
base model by `14,000, or 17.5 per
cent, to `65,900 in September, about
two to three months after the locally
made phone hit the market.
This was down to the efforts of
Cook’s India visit, which was a major
turning point in Apple India’s jour-
ney. People aware of the discussions
between Apple’s team, led by Cook,
and the Union government, presided
over by Prime Minister Narendra
Modi himself, say that one of the key
takeaways was addressing India’s
requirement of 30 per cent local
sourcing. That settled, Wistron built
the first Apple plant in Karnataka,
which started off making the iPhone
SE in 2017.
Soon, other contract manu-
facturers came on board and, like
others globally, opened plants exclu-
sively for Apple products. Foxconn
has one plant near Chennai making
iPAD DRIVES
GROWTH
Apple is estimated to end 2021
with a 22 per cent share of
the tablets market
Q3, 2021
28.5 (31)
144%
23.8 (45)
29%
18.6 (12) (2nd)
8.6 (17)
11%
5.1 (NA)
8.5 (47) Q1
2021 (Rank) 2020
Source: IDC India Source: CMR
iPhones, while Pegatron is scheduled
to also open a plant soon. Foxconn
has already started trial production
of the iPhone 13, launched globally
this September, and is expected to
roll out the phones by March 2022.
While domestic production is
key to lowering costs and prices,
starting this as fast as possible after
the global launch of a model is key
to tapping into the nascent demand.
Apple has been steadily closing this
launch-to-production gap in India.
When it started domestic manufac-
turing, the gap was one year. That
narrowed to eight months for the
iPhone 11 and 12. With iPhone 13,
Apple plans to further close the gap
to five-to-six months.
Unlike a few years ago, India
is now a priority market for Apple.
Not only are all its products and
consumer services available here,
all new products are also launched
simultaneously in India and two
dozen other key markets. Even four
years ago, a product used to make its
Business Today 23 January 2022
65%
47%
23% 23%
(3rd) (3rd)
16%
12%
Q2 Q3
YoY change
| 53
way to India months after its launch,
after traversing about 25-30 other
priority markets.
“India is only the third country
in the world where iPhones are
made. This is a testimony to how
important this market is now. In
the past five years, operations have
been expanded into multiple direc-
tions like growing local sourcing,
retail reach and the Apple online
store,” says another Apple official,
who also requested anonymity
as the person is not authorised to
speak to the media.
Given Apple’s laser-sharp focus
on India in the past few years, three
of its global contract manufactur-
ers—Foxconn, Wistron and Pega-
tron—have also invested heavily
in building their manufacturing
heft. In October 2020, the trio was
selected to participate in the In-
dian government’s newly launched
production-linked incentive (PLI)
scheme to boost the local manufac-
turing and export of smartphones.
 Apple India
Despite its record performance,
experts say the iPhone’s heydays are
yet to come. Apple has about 50 mil-
lion users in a country that houses
some 500 million Android users, per
market research firm Counterpoint’s
estimates. “This is a very big oppor-
tunity for Apple now to draw those
Android users into the iOS universe,”
says Tarun Pathak, Research Direc-
tor at Counterpoint Research.
Further, with the average selling
price of a smartphone surging to an
all-time high of nearly `20,000, a
large section of Android users are
closer to the lowest-priced iPhone
that usually costs about `30,000-
35,000. Currently, smartphones
costing `20,000-30,000 account
for roughly 13 per cent of total
sales, while phones above `30,000
account for about 10 per cent. In a
market where more than 160 million
smartphones are sold each year,
54 | Apple now has an unprecedented
opportunity to make the dent it
always aspired to. All thanks to local
manufacturing.
Cook’s recipe for a larger India
foray, though, was not limited to the
iPhone.
W
hile apple doesn’t
yet manufacture
MacBooks in India,
it wasn’t content
with being a fringe
player in this segment. However, it
couldn’t lower its landed cost for
the imported laptops, so it decided
to drop prices instead to boost its
market share. The company started
cutting prices of Macs around 2017-
18. Bringing down the price of its
entry-level notebook to a small pre-
mium over the competition worked
wonders, as it did for the iPhones.
“A vast majority of college-goers,
who will soon become active buy-
ers, aspire to own Apple devices.
Thus, keeping the fruit just at the
edge of their reach has helped Apple
recently,” says Ambi Parameswaran,
Continue
veteran brand strategist and Found-
er of advisory firm Brand-Building.
com. “This is a welcome change from
its previous stance when buying an
Apple product in India was not only
exorbitantly costly but its availability
was a major issue as well.”
Although Apple’s recent per-
formance in the PC market was
driven by its consumer products,
it is now steadily gaining steam in
the enterprise segment as well, says
Navkendar Singh, Research Direc-
tor at IDC India. This is crucial as
apart from bulk sales, enterprises
also ensure a steady flow of service
revenue. “Once you can convince
the enterprises that your software
and hardware can work seamlessly,
it is a great business opportunity for
Apple that remains to be exploited
in India,” says Singh. In fact, Apple
has already established a dedicated
team to crack the enterprise PC
market. And if demand continues
northward, it may even consider as-
sembling Macs in India, say sources
familiar with Apple’s plans.
Besides manufacturing and pric-
ing, the third arrow in Apple’s quiver
to change its fortunes in India was
controlling its distribution. From
a few hundred stores about seven
years ago, Apple products are now
available in well over 10,000 outlets
run by premium sellers or dealer-
cum-distributors such as Unicorn,
Redington and Ingram Micro. It also
has a tie-up with Reliance, which op-
erates the largest number of branded
retail outlets in the country. That
partnership had its genesis in 2016
when Cook met Anant Ambani, the
son of Reliance Industries Chairman
Mukesh Ambani, and others.
This retail footprint was nec-
essary since its rivals were also
expanding their physical presence,
largely aping the strategy of the
Chinese incumbents like vivo, Oppo
and Lenovo. Xiaomi, for example,
entered India in mid-2014 with an
online-only strategy but had 15,000
owned and partner stores by mid-
Business Today 23 January 2022
2021. Samsung, the No. 2 in India
and Apple’s only real competitor, has
over 100,000 stores that also sell its
consumer durables products.
Apple’s stellar performance in re-
cent quarters has also reflected well
on its retail partners. Take Baljinder
Paul Singh, for instance. His associa-
tion with Apple harks back to 1996
when Apple was selling computers to
a handful of enterprise-level clients.
Singh gave up playing professional
table tennis at that time to distribute
Apple products. Now, his venture,
Unicorn, is a `1,000-crore business
that, he claims, is India’s largest pre-
mium reseller of Apple products.
Both the pace of expansion and
sales growth have accelerated in
the past two years and, despite
the pandemic, demand for Apple
products has jumped by nearly 50 per
cent in FY21, Singh said in an earlier
interview to this correspondent. He
declined to share specifics due to
Apple’s strict policy on media interac-
tions for its employees and partners.
Apple’s stellar performance
convinced Singh that it was the right
time to place his bet. Unicorn has
both opened stores in small towns
like Palghar (Maharashtra) and
grown its presence in bigger cities
like Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh). In
line with the traditional Apple Store,
Unicorn unveiled 3,000 sq.-ft show-
rooms in Delhi that cost 150 per cent
more than a standard 800-1,000
sq.- ft store.
Similarly, Redington, one of the
largest distributors of Apple prod-
ucts in India, has also benefitted. In
FY21 “the contribution of this par-
ticular vendor [Apple] to our overall
revenue was significant, as high as
close to about 38-40 per cent”, Raj
Shankar, Vice Chairman and MD,
Redington India, said during an
earnings call in August. And despite
challenges on the supply side, the
Chennai-based company’s revenue
from India shot up 41 per cent to
`12,271 crore between April and
September in 2021, while interna-
 A growing number of Indian consumers has become accustomed to premium products from Apple
tional revenue remained stagnant.
That was largely due to Apple, which
accounted for about 29 per cent of
Redington’s revenue by September,
up from 26 per cent a year ago.
However, the increasing retail
footprint came at the cost of Apple’s
famed exclusivity factor. Now, Apple
is focussing on bringing its go-to-
market route under its fold. After
numerous delays, it is set to inaugu-
rate its first Apple Store in Mumbai
in early 2022, followed by ones in
Delhi and Bengaluru. Apple’s long-
standing partners are hailing this
development. “The Apple Store will
be very positive for us. The kind of
marketing they will do for the entire
ecosystem is remarkable. I welcome
Apple Stores in the country,” says
Unicorn’s Singh.
Apple also launched its India on-
line store in September 2020, which
Cook said helped the company’s
performance the following quarter.
“Last quarter (October-December
2020) was the full first quarter of
the online store. That has gotten
a great reaction and has helped us
achieve the results that we got last
quarter,” Cook said on an earnings
call in January. “We are also going in
there with retail stores in the future
and so we look at that to be another
great initiative, and we continue to
develop the channel as well.” Apple
already gets over 20 per cent of its
revenue through online sales from
partnerships with e-commerce ma-
jors such as Amazon and Flipkart.
And strong product sales ulti-
mately feed into Apple’s cash cow—
services. While services account
for nearly 22 per cent of its global
revenue, its share in India is insig-
nificant. However, Indians’ growing
affinity for over-the-top subscrip-
tions, especially since the pandemic,
has opened up that market for Apple
as well. To begin with, it offers Apple
Music and Apple TV+ at `99 per
month each, which “is the lowest
price globally”, according to a source
in Apple familiar with its pricing
strategy. Apple’s ecosystem is argu-
ably the most well-established and
well-entrenched in the world, and
given the rate of increase in product
sales, India will soon be a significant
part of that web.
Feeding into that web is Apple’s
app development centre in Hyder-
abad, which opened in 2016 (yes, co-
inciding with Cook’s visit). “Today
it employs over 5,000 people and is
one of the largest globally for Apple,”
Business Today 23 January 2022
says the source. The company’s app
accelerator programme in Benga-
luru makes India one of the “very
few countries that have a developers’ | 55
academy”, the source adds. In fact,
the company has already made dedi-
cated apps for automaker Maruti
Suzuki as well as Hero Cycles,
among others, to manage their
inventory, sales and customer inter-
face. The next focus is to cash in on
the burgeoning e-learning sector in
India, said Priya Balasubramaniam,
Apple’s Vice President of Product
Operations, at a recent event. “We
see an exciting opportunity for India
to go further and train its emerging
workforce in the foundations of
smart manufacturing, intelligent
design, connected and optimised
systems.”
From being a fringe player in the
country’s electronics market, Apple
has now finally managed to crack
the India code. The various pieces
of its India strategy are not only
falling into place but also interlock-
ing seamlessly. If this continues, a
$3-trillion market capitalisation will
be only one of the few records under
Apple’s belt next year.
@arndutt
 INTERVIEW UDAYAN MUKHERJEE

‘I’M NOT EMOTIONAL

ABOUT MY BUSINESSES’
Ajay Piramal, Chairman of the Piramal Group, talks
at length about his plans for the financial services
business, succession and retirement
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MANDAR DEODHAR

| 61

Business Today 23 January 2022

 INTERVIEW UDAYAN MUKHERJEE
A
fter dipping
his toes into
many diverse
businesses
over the
decades, maverick billionaire Ajay
Piramal seems to have homed in on
financial services and pharmaceuticals
as his two big bets. With the completion
of the Dewan Housing acquisition and
a demerger of the finance and pharma
businesses on the anvil, he is all set to
give them one big push before handing
the reins over to son Anand and
daughter Nandini. In a freewheeling
chat with Business Today’s Global
Business Editor Udayan Mukherjee, he
62 |
talks about his career trajectory, what
drives his investment decisions, family
ties and retirement. Edited excerpts:
Q: Ajay, over the years you have done so
many things. It started with textiles, which
you sold off, then pharmaceuticals, which
you made a grand success of before selling
it off. Then you dabbled with things like
Vodafone, and now you have re-entered
finance in a big way with the acquisition of
Dewan Housing. People who admire you
would say you are an entrepreneur with a
remarkable sense of adventure, but your
critics may say that you are a businessman
with an investor’s mindset and not an
institution builder’s mindset. How would
you respond to that?
A: So, it’s a fair question, Udayan. Let’s look at where
we began. You talked about pharmaceuticals. We
entered pharmaceuticals in India in 1988 through
the acquisition of Nicholas Laboratories and for
20 years we built it. It was ranked 48th in the ORG
list of companies in pharma and when we exited in
2010 we were ranked No. 3. If that is not building
a business then I don’t know what is. It wasn’t an
example of an investor approach because during
Business Today 23 January 2022
that period we actually invested a lot in growing the
business through acquisitions and the reason why we
exited it was because I look upon myself as a trustee
for all our stakeholders. Stakeholders means our em-
ployees, our customers, society and our shareholders,
and I thought it was in the best interest of all these
stakeholders that we exit at the time we did. So, I won’t
say that that was an opportunistic investment. In my
view, it was the right thing to do.
Q: Fair answer but you have re-entered phar-
maceuticals in a big way again, so my question
is not so much to do with the past but the
future. The way you are investing in finance
right now, is it possible that you may build this
business, too, but not hesitate to sell it at some
point? Or do you feel differently about the
finance business today?
A: If you would like to see it as a fault, you can say that
I’m not emotionally so connected. I don’t believe my
identity is the same as the businesses that I run. I think
I have a separate identity. So, to say that I want to build
an empire which is in financial services or in pharma-
ceuticals, that’s never my intention. My intention is to
really work in the best interest of my stakeholders and
create value. Coming to financial services as well, that’s
exactly the intention and I know in the future it will be
up to the next generation to decide what they want to
do with it.
Q: I just want to understand your game plan
with the financial business. Not so long ago,
you actually were trying to cobble together
something with your investments in the
“I would like both my kids
to take over the businesses.
They are getting their teams
ready. They have been
working on it. The sooner it is,
the better [it is] for me”
Shriram Group. You sold off your investment
with Shriram Transport Finance but you still
retain a large chunk of Shriram Capital and
now there’s a group reorganisation which is
going on there. Now, is there a play between
Dewan Housing, Piramal Enterprises and
Shriram Capital or would you now have to
divest your holding in Shriram Capital?
A: In Shriram Capital, when we invested in it, our plan
was to always be in the financial services business. Shri- “Mukesh [Ambani] and I go
ram was more in the retail business; Piramal had started a long way back. We were
a wholesale lending business and we could have brought friends from before our kids
them together. That was the original plan. But as time were born... We have had a
went by, we realised it would not have created value for
either Shriram or Piramal because both the cultures
very close relationship and
were very different and it did not make any sense for us the union between Anand and
just to do it in the interest of size and therefore we will Isha has only cemented it”
ultimately disinvest our Shriram holding. We have done
that with Shriram Transport and at the right time we
will do so with Shriram Capital and Shriram City Union.
As far as DHFL (Dewan Housing Finance Ltd) and Pira-
mal are concerned, now they have become one entity.

Q: And what is the eventual goal for this

merged entity, because a few years ago you did
try to bring together Shriram and IDFC Bank to
have a significant banking presence. Is it still a
goal to become a bank one day?
A: As far as we are concerned we are building a signifi-
cant-sized business in financial services. Even today, if
you look at the equity we have in our finance business,
it’s almost `18,000 crore. If I add the unallocated equity | 63
in the parent, the 100 per cent parent of Piramal Capital,
it brings the total to about `30,000 crore. So, we have
enough firepower to grow this business as we want. Today
we are just working together to ensure that we build a ro-
bust business which is in line with what the Reserve Bank
[of India] wants for a banking licence and then it’s really
up to the RBI to decide.

Q: How are you likely to position this finance

business of yours? With DHFL you have a
significant presence in the housing finance
market, but how would you be positioned
compared to market leaders like HDFC or LIC
Housing Finance?
A: We want to be in retail as well as wholesale lending;
we want to do not only housing finance but also unse-
cured lending. It will be slightly different from HDFC
and LIC Housing in the sense that our housing loans will
mainly be in Tier II and Tier III cities whereas the HD-
FCs have it in larger cities. The second thing is that we
would go both for salaried as well as non-salaried bor-
rowers. Our composition for salaried and non-salaried
clients is about 50-50, which is higher than what the
others would have.

Q: But you don’t have access to deposits yet

in the way an HDFC may have because of the
complications with the Dewan Housing deposit
licence, and on the other hand you are up

Business Today 23 January 2022

 INTERVIEW UDAYAN MUKHERJEE

against these nimble fintechs who ON THE changed today with consolidation taking
are trying to play your game with FINANCE place in the sector, which also means bigger
a very large number of customer BUSINESS players are doing better and the marginal
touch points. Caught between We want to be
players have fallen by the wayside. Besides,
these two, do you see yourself in retail as well interest rates have come down and some of
at any kind of disadvantage or as wholesale the housing loans are sub-7 per cent, which
handicap? lending... not is also a big plus alongside the fact that real
A: I think you are right that as of now we only housing estate prices haven’t gone up over the past
finance but
do not have a deposit-taking licence. Actu- four or five years. So, demand has come
also unsecured
ally, the deposit-taking licence for DHFL lending. Our back. Covid-19 has also helped in bringing
was suspended before we acquired it. We housing loans up the demand from the higher income seg-
are hoping that as time goes by the RBI will mainly be in ment where savings have piled up. There’s
looks at us favourably for a deposit-taking Tier II and Tier III hardly been any travel in the past two years.
cities… [And] we
licence. But quite apart from that, the cost would go both for
There has been no spending on weddings,
of funding which other large competitors salaried as well no spending on restaurants and people have
have will be lower than ours for a while to as non-salaried also realised that they need more space at
come. Therefore, what we need to do is to borrowers. home. All this has brought about a revival in
go into those areas which are not so easy demand, which will continue for a while.
to enter and which are not of great interest ON HIS
to the larger players. That’s why I talked BANKING Q: Your son Anand runs the real
PLANS
about Tier II and Tier III cities. Fintechs, estate business. How much of a
on the other hand, bring in a lot of technol- We are working mentoring hand do you place on his
ogy which we are also trying to do but if together to shoulder? Is he cutting his teeth in
you look at the fintechs most of them are ensure that we the realty arm before joining the
64 | not of significant size and don’t have the build a robust main fold of Piramal Enterprises?
balance sheet that we would have. Very business which is A: So, what we are doing in terms of
in line with what
often, they have a lot of technology but not the Reserve Bank structure is a demerger of pharmaceuticals
enough experience in lending. I think we [of India] wants and financial services, so in the next nine
have to be very aware of what the big boys for a banking months they should be both independently
are doing and what fintechs are doing and licence. listed on the stock exchanges. As far as
we have to find our own path. pharmaceuticals is concerned, my daugh-
ON ter Nandini—who has been in this business
Q: Speaking of housing, I want to SUCCESSION for 13-14 years and is running it even to-
ask you about the Indian real es- day—will continue to run it, perhaps more
My daughter
tate market, which has been in the Nandini will independently. I am fortunate that both
dumps for the past seven-eight continue to run of my kids Nandini and Anand graduated
years. In the past nine months, it (the pharma from the best schools in the world, Nandini
there are clear signs of a revival business). from Stanford and Anand from Harvard, so
after many years. You have a large And as far as they are good. And even as far as financial
financial services
group company in real estate, is concerned, services is concerned, Anand is taking
which your son runs. What is Anand is taking much more interest in it now so it’s not
your sense? Do you think this real much more like he is going to come into the financial
estate and housing turnaround is interest in it. services fold; he is already in it.
for real?
A: As you said, for eight years it has been ON HIS LIFE Q: Is that the succession plan in a
a total downward cycle in housing as MANTRA way at the Piramal group—that your
it was affected by several headwinds. son runs real estate and finance and
The first part
First, the inflated cost of housing as land of your life is daughter runs pharmaceuticals?
prices shot up and over time there were to learn, [the] A: Yes, it is. We are preparing them to take
challenges—whether it was demonetisa- second part of [on] larger responsibilities in both and
tion, RERA, GST, Covid-19 and so on. your life is to earn that’s what they are engaged in.
But every business has to have a cycle and then you
have to return.
in a growth economy—real estate is Q: And you have the very interest-
important, the whole environment has ing, even enviable position of having

Business Today 23 January 2022


Mukesh Ambani as Anand’s father-in-law.
Do you ever get together for a cup of coffee,
discuss business? What’s your equation with
him like?
A: Mukesh and I actually go a long way back. We were
friends from before our kids were born, so that’s the
good thing. I think both of us have seen our children
being born. He was around when Anand was born and
I have seen Isha being born. We have had a very close
relationship and the union between Anand and Isha has
only cemented it further.
Q: Mukesh isn’t the only top-level businessman
you can be linked with. You were on the board
of Tata Sons at the time N. Chandrasekaran
took over and you have had the perspective of
seeing him work over the past many years. As an
insider almost, are you happy with the way Tata
Sons is shaping up under him? Would you say he
has your vote?
A: There is no doubt about that and you don’t need my
validation of what he has achieved. The markets say it
and you can see the business performance reflecting
it, so I think this has been an exceptional performance
over the past five years from where he took over to
where the group is today. There’s a material change and
that’s quite obvious to see in every business.
Q: How many more years do you see yourself
hanging in, Ajay, because you are getting on
and running these large businesses can’t be
easy. You have built a large empire and your
children are ready. How much time before
Ajay Piramal is seen sitting at Mahalakshmi
racecourse watching the horses go by, with
Business Today 23 January 2022
“I don’t believe my identity is
the same as the businesses
that I run. I think I have a
separate identity...
My intention is to really work
in the best interest
of my stakeholders and
create value”
daughter and son running the show?
A: Udayan, I still go to Mahalakshmi racecourse and
watch the horses go by and sometimes sit on them as
well and take my grandchildren [along], so that’s not
going to change. But yes, over time they will step in and
I would like both my kids to take over the businesses. | 65
They are getting their teams ready. They have been
working on it. The sooner it is, the better [it is] for me. I
would like to do more things in life.
Q: What are those things? I believe you are
spiritually inclined and spend a lot of time
thinking about life and its many conundrums.
What do you have planned out for the next
10-15 years?
A: The way the world is, I don’t know how many years
are left for anybody, but yes, I am spiritually inclined and
I would want to do more of it. Catch up on my reading,
as it is a very important part of my life. In addition, we
have a foundation and I would like to spend much more
time on that. As they say—the first part of your life is to
learn, second part of your life is to earn and then you have
to return. So, we have been trying to do just that. The
Prime Minister has identified 112 districts as aspirational
districts. They are the most undeveloped and about 16
per cent of our population lives there, but of the total
CSR funding only 1.5 per cent goes there, so we must
improve this. We are working with NITI Aayog, with
various state and central governments to do something
there. We have a big tribal initiative. Every year we do a
fellowship of young fellows who are either graduates or
postgraduates. This year we recruited 650. They work
with us 24/7 for two years to become better leaders. Any
small contribution we can make in building this country
is what we want to do.
 BREA
INNOVATION

A
OF PURIFIED
66 | AIR
BY BINU PAUL

M
ovie theatres are the first to
shut whenever Covid-19 infec-
tions go up. But when PVR Cin-
emas, India’s largest multiplex
chain, welcomed back audienc-
es in November, it did so with
the promise of clean, sterilised
cinema halls. This also meant
purified air for patrons, to put them at ease about sitting
in closed auditoriums. For this, the company turned to an
anti-viral air purification device called Wolf Airmask, de-
veloped by home-grown start-up Allabout Innovations.
“We evaluated several solutions that can make cin-
ema halls secure,” says Kapil Agarwal, Joint Managing
Director of UFO Moviez India, which installed the device
across PVR’s 856 screens. “We found the Wolf Airmask to
be the only device that had been tested on coronavirus in
an ICMR-approved lab.” Agarwal says the company has
received several enquiries about the device since it was in-
stalled at PVR. The digital services provider has exclusive
distribution rights to sell the device to cinemas in India
and the Middle-East, and the government sector in India.
Born in the depths of the lockdown in the coastal town
of Alappuzha, Kerala, the Wolf Airmask is seeing its de-
ployment both in India and in overseas markets. Sujesh
Sugunan, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Allabout Inno-
vations, credits everything to serendipity.
It all began when Sugunan, 46, who also runs a mar-

Business Today 23 January 2022

ATH
Allabout Innovations is
aggressively expanding
production of its anti-viral air
purification device, developed in
the coastal town of Alappuzha in
Kerala, to meet global demand | 67

keting and events business in Dubai, was confined to his
home in Alappuzha during the first wave of the virus. He
utilised the time to rekindle his connection with a vol-
untary scientific community he has been a part of since
the time he worked at the Electronics Research & Devel-
opment Centre of India (ER&DCI) Institute of Tech-
nology, Thiruvananthapuram, some 20 years ago. The
community once again banded together to offer techni-
cal assistance to government agencies during the early
phase of the Covid-19 outbreak. The team learnt about
ozone generators being used in Germany and Japan
for sanitisation, but their attempts at importing ozone
modules from China were unsuccessful.
With the help of some research papers from the
University of Oxford and Hamburg University, this
group of scientists built a prototype of an ozone gener-
ator at a fraction of a cost at which it is available in the
international markets. The device could sanitise an
area of 5,000 sq. ft and the community offered about 25
of them free of cost to government agencies. But there
was demand from all quarters. To keep up with it, Su-
gunan set up Allabout Innovations to manufacture the
device commercially.
back to the drawing board
Ozone, however, is highly reactive and needs to be han-
dled carefully. “Ozone has a half-life of about 28 minutes;

Business Today 23 January 2022

 INNOVATION — HEALTHCARE
no one should enter the territory [where
sanitisation took place] during the time.
To cover more areas, they weren’t fol-
lowing the protocols strictly [and] peo-
ple were falling ill,” says Sugunan.
The team went back to the drawing
board and began thinking about build-
ing a solution where people could be
present during sanitisation. That’s when
the concept of negative ions popped up.
Negative ions are odourless, taste-
less, and invisible molecules floating in
the atmosphere that have been charged
with electricity. They are capable of
cleaning airborne allergens such as pol-
len, mould spores, bacteria and viruses.
“Ions are capable of interacting
with the surface proteins of any kind
of virus. In the case of coronavirus, we
have the S protein, which is positively
charged. Ions are predominantly nega-
tively charged and can bond with the S
protein’s positive charge, which then be-
comes inactivated. Once the protein is
68 | neutralised, it cannot penetrate into the
cell,” explains Prince Xavier, Scientist
(Computational Chemist) in Molecular
Chemistry, Bangalore University, who is
part of the community and was an early
advisor to Sugunan.
Sugunan gathered a team under
his newly-formed company and built
a negative ion generator device—
more commonly called air ioniser—
and christened it Wolf Airmask. Air
ionisers use high voltage to ionise or
electrically charge air molecules and
release negative ions.
The start-up tested the device on
the SARS-CoV-2 virus at the ICMR-ap-
proved Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotech-
nology, Thiruvananthapuram. The test
revealed that Wolf Airmask is efficient
in rupturing the viral envelope of SARS-
CoV-2 in just 15 minutes, reducing the
Covid-19 viral load by 99.9 per cent. The
device has also been successfully tested
against other viruses, including E. Coli
and MS2 bacteriophage at several ICMR
and NABL-approved labs since, besides
the Dubai Central Laboratory.
Using plasma air sterilisation tech-
nology, the Wolf Airmask, for which
FOUNDER, CHAIRMAN AND CEO,
the start-up has filed a patent, can dis-
Business Today 23 January 2022
THE
charge up to 100 trillion negative ions
per cubic cm per second. Available in
CLIENT two capacities, the device can work for
LIST
a minimum of 60,000 hours—or about
6.8 years—without any maintenance.
A selection of While the technology is not new, the use
organisations where case is, the start-up says.
the Wolf Airmask The device is currently produced at its
has been deployed Kerala unit, the capacity of which is being
APOLLO TYRES enhanced to 15,000 units a month from
ASIANET
10,000. The company is also in the pro-
cess of setting up manufacturing units
DISNEY
in the UAE and Qatar, and a large factory
DP WORLD is in the pipeline in Karnataka. The com-
INDIAN AIR FORCE pany aims to ramp up total production to
40,000-50,000 units every month.
INDIAN OIL
KERALA HIGH COURT
KERALA INFRASTRUCTURE foreign foray
INVESTMENT FUND According to the company, demand for
BOARD
the Wolf Airmask is strong abroad, es-
OLAM INTERNATIONAL pecially in the Middle-East. Atlas Medi-
PVR CINEMAS cal, a 45-year-old medical equipment
distribution company in the UAE, is in
the final stages of negotiations with the
SOURCE: COMPANY
Dubai Health Authority (a government
organisation overseeing the health sys-
tem of Dubai) to install the device across
its healthcare facilities. V. Kalyan Sunda-
ram, General Manager of Atlas Medical,
expects the deal to be a gateway to the
larger market in the country.
“We did some local testing of the
product, including with Dubai Munici-
pality and other customers, and the re-
sults were really good. We are currently
installing the device at several govern-
ment and private enterprises in the UAE,
including RAK Hospital, BYJU’S, Radis-
son Hotel Group, and the Roads & Trans-
port Authority of Dubai,” Sundaram says.
“Demand is emerging He expects to sell 25,000-30,000 units
from every corner of
the world. The size a year in the UAE besides taking it to the
of the market is huge African markets.
and you will soon see While the UAE was its first interna-
a lot more companies
coming up with this tional market, Sugunan says the Wolf
kind of product. We are Airmask is currently present in 30 coun-
100 per cent sure that tries spread across all continents. The
after television, this is company has set up offices in the UAE,
going to be the next
big white good to hit Qatar, Finland, the US and Australia
the market” where it plans to operate on its own, while
it aims to penetrate all other markets, in-
SUJESH SUGUNAN cluding India, via distribution partners.
ALLABOUT INNOVATIONS Back home, Sugunan says Mumbai-
 MEET THE WOLF AIRMASK
The air ioniser comes in two variants, based on area covered

VARIANT

Wolf Airmask WA-1000 WA-500

Operation Plasma Air Sterilisation
Technology
Dimensions 25 cm x 21 cm x 21 cm
Power consumption 40 W 30 W
Estimated ion 10-100 trillion 15-30 million
emission per second per second
Effective area covered 1,000 sq. ft 500 sq. ft
by one device
Effective volume 10,000 cubic ft 5,000
coverage cubic ft
Warranty Two years
Safe solution Workers at the Allabout
Innovations factory in Cherthala, Kerala SOURCE: COMPANY

based UFO Moviez, with about 10,600 partner movie
theatres, has committed to installing the device at 5,600
theatres. Every theatre requires around 25-30 machines.
The company has already supplied some 4,500 units to
PVR. Agarwal of UFO Moviez says his company has de-
ployed around 10,000 devices across sectors, and antici-
pates sales of about 50,000-100,000 in the next one year.
While the start-up may have a patent for the prod-
uct, what is to stop other companies from using similar
technology for a similar use case? Sugunan seems unper-
turbed. “Demand is emerging from every corner of the
world. The size of the market is huge and you will soon see
a lot more companies coming up with this kind of prod-
uct,” he says. Leveraging the first-mover advantage, Al-
labout Innovations is building a strong distribution net-
work through strategic tie-ups. This has also helped the
start-up establish partnerships with governments and
companies in a very short span of time, he says.
not just for covid-19
Besides this, Sugunan sees a larger market for the de-
vice’s many use cases. In Japan and Finland, for instance,
negative ion generator devices are extensively used to
help people fight stress and fatigue, as a higher negative
ion concentration in the breathable atmosphere could
increase levels of the mood hormone serotonin, he says.
Negative ion generators are already used in high-end cars,
while some aircraft also deploy them on long-haul flights.
Another use case could be agriculture. “We did re-
search to study how effective Wolf Airmask is for plants. | 69
The study showed that it increases germination levels by
30 per cent and yield by 20 per cent. We are currently test-
ing machines for agricultural purpose with a Dubai-based
agri-tech company,” Sugunan says.
Abdul Rahman R.S., General Manager at GreenGate
Co., a private agency that works closely with the govern-
ment of UAE on infrastructure and community develop-
ment, is planning to make the Wolf Airmask available to
glass houses in the country. They are also in the process
of completing a pilot study of the device with G-42, an ar-
tificial intelligence and cloud computing company in Abu
Dhabi, and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the largest
energy company in the UAE. “We are working closely with
the government and corporates who are involved in stabi-
lising our community’s health and safety,” says Rahman.
The Wolf Airmask comes in two variants that cover
500 sq. ft and 1,000 sq. ft space, and are priced at `24,780
and `35,400 (both prices including GST), respectively.
The company is currently building a portable model that
can cover 250 sq. ft, targeting the business-to-consumer
(B2C) market. Sugunan predicts that every home or of-
fice space will have a negative ion generator or negative
ion generating plant. “We are 100 per cent sure that after
television, this is going to be the next big white good to hit
the market,” he says. While that is debatable, what is cer-
tain is that if Covid-19 persists, the demand for purified
air—and air ionisers—will also persist.
@binu_t_paul

Business Today 23 January 2022

 I L LU ST R AT I O N BY A N I R BA N G H OS H

SHOULD
70 | YOU
INVEST
OVERSEAS?
many b ro k in g f i r m s a r e

facil i tati ng i n v e stm e n ts

in in t e rn ati o n a l

mar k e ts . h e r e ’s
the low d own o n t h e

chal l e ng e s a n d r i s ks

BY TEENA JAIN KAUSHAL

Business Today 23 January 2022

 MONEY TODAY — OVERSEAS MARKETS
D
e lh i -based
housewife Archa-
na Gupta wants to
send her 14-year-
old daughter
abroad for higher
studies. There is,
however, one big
challenge before her. The 45-year-old
is worried about the depreciating ru-
pee, which means she will have to shell
out more than just the college fees to
cover the currency risk. Consider this:
On December 20, 2011, $1 was equal to
`52.77, while on December 20, 2021, it
was equal to `75.84. It is for this reason
that she and her businessman husband
are considering investing in equities
in international markets as, along with
higher returns, it also hedges against
currency fluctuations.
There are many like Gupta who are
investing in international markets to
build a fund that eliminates the currency
risk. Direct investing is possible in the
stocks of several countries, but invest-
ing in US stocks is considered the most
popular as the New York Stock Exchange
(NYSE) and NASDAQ are the world’s
largest stock exchanges. “One can invest
in some of the world’s largest technology
companies like Apple, Tesla, Starbucks,
Nike and Meta (Facebook) when invest-
ing in the US stock markets. Such invest-
ment opportunities are not available via
local stock markets,” says Viram Shah,
INVESTING
Co-founder and CEO of Vested Finance,
a California-headquartered company,
which is a registered investment advi-
IN US
STOCKS
sor with the US Securities and Exchange
Commission (SEC).
However, people have now started
looking beyond the US markets and their
investments are also not limited to eq- 0Brokerage
% | 71
uities. “We are seeing investors access
fee
unique opportunities in the UK and Eu-
rope—using Winvesta’s multi-currency
account—and diversifying beyond US
`1,000-
1,500
stocks. These include managed funds,
crowdfunding platforms, fractional real
estate, and debt instruments,” says Pra-
teek Jain, Co-founder and President, Wire fee
charged by
Winvesta, a financial services firm head- the bank (NIL VIA
quartered and regulated in the UK. VESTED DIRECT)
Another key benefit of investing over-
2%
seas is that it gives a geographic diver-
sification to your portfolio and ensures
that you don’t have all your eggs in one
Forex markup
basket. “You can invest in companies and (1.2% VIA
themes that are touted to be the future VESTED DIRECT)
and are not easily available in the domes-
tic market, such as clean energy, crypto-
currencies, robotics, and AI, among oth- $11
ers,” says Jain. Withdrawal
fees
uncharted territory
0.5-1%
The first question, of course, is how
does one invest in the overseas market? Withdrawal
There are several ways to do that. You forex markup
can open a brokerage account abroad ei- SOURCE:
ther through a domestic brokerage (such VESTED FINANCE
Business Today 23 January 2022
 MONEY TODAY — OVERSEAS MARKETS
as Vested Finance or Winvesta) that
offers this service or through a for-
eign brokerage. Many Indian bro-
kers also enable foreign investing
for their customers. Angel Broking,
5paisa and Axis Direct, for instance,
have partnered with Vested Finance
to provide services to their clients.
Investments Once your account is open, you
in US equities need to fund it with foreign cur-
must be made in
US dollars. For rency. Investments in the account
this, you need to are made by using the Liberalised
remit USD to the Remittance Scheme (LRS) of the
partner bank in Reserve Bank of India (RBI), which
the US is available to all resident Indians.
VIRAM SHAH Through this scheme, an individual
CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, can remit up to $250,000 per finan-
VESTED FINANCE
cial year for such transactions.
“Investments in US equities
must be made in US dollars. For
this, you need to remit USD to the
partner bank in the US. To open an
account, you will need proofs of ID
and address. The whole process is
72 | paperless and can be completed in
minutes. The next step after KYC is
One of the key
benefits of investing to fund your account with USD,” ex-
overseas is that you plains Shah.
can invest in firms To make the process of invest-
and themes that ing in the US markets easy, Vested
are touted to be the has also launched Vested Direct in
future and not easily partnership with SBM Bank India.
available in the Vested Direct is an INR wallet that
domestic market
lets you load USD into your US bro-
PRATEEK JAIN kerage account. You can use your
CO-FOUNDER AND
PRESIDENT, WINVESTA existing bank’s netbanking solution
to load funds into your Vested Direct
account, after which you can initiate
a USD deposit request from the app.
“When you are initiating a deposit
request for the first time, SBM Bank
will require your existing bank ac-
count statement of 12 months. Once
SBM Bank approves your transac-
If your portfolio tion, the funds will get credited
value is large and to your Vested brokerage account
you have the time to
devote to analysing within 24 hours,” says Shah.
and tracking foreign Once the funds are in, you can
stocks, then by start investing. You can place trades
all means invest and, most importantly, buy fraction-
directly al shares. This means that you can
get started by investing as little as
GAURAV RASTOGI
FOUNDER AND CEO, $1. “With Winvesta’s new UPI-based
KUVERA.IN remittances, investing in US stocks
Business Today 23 January 2022
can become as easy as investing do-
mestically,” says Jain.
testing the waters
Let’s look at the returns. The Nifty
50 has underperformed the S&P 500
this year. According to data provided
by Winvesta, Nifty, the 50-stock In-
dian benchmark, has gained 20 per
cent, while the S&P 500 has returned
25 per cent to investors this year (till
December 21). If we talk about a 10-
year timeframe, Nifty gained 255 per
cent, while S&P 500 rose 273 per cent
over the same period. On top of that,
the US dollar appreciated almost
43 per cent against the INR over 10
years, making the returns of S&P 500
over 430 per cent in INR terms.
However, the picture remains
incomplete if we don’t take costs
into consideration. Unlike the do-
mestic market, where your money
gets fully invested straightaway,
in case of international investing,
various charges get deducted before
the amount gets invested. Suppose
you want to invest `1 lakh in the US
markets, then around `3,000-5,000
can be deducted towards various
costs such as remittance and forex
charges. However, these charges vary
from broker to broker. For example,
Vested charges remittance expenses
from `1,000-1,500 per transaction.
These charges are nil through Vested
Direct. Similarly, Winvesta has a re-
mittance fee of `500-1,500 if you opt
for UPI through banks. Otherwise,
the charges are nil. But that’s not all.
You are also charged around $10-11 at
the time of withdrawing money from
your account. Then there are forex in-
ward charges of 0.5-1 per cent.
A back-of-the-envelope calcula-
tion shows that for small investors,
investing directly could be a costly
affair. This is because an investment
of `10,000 can cost approximately
`1,000-2,500. Small investors, there-
fore, need to earn high returns to
cover the cost of investing abroad.
Having said that, the remittance and
KNOW BEFORE YOU INVEST
The taxation aspect of investing in US markets
INCOME TAX RATES
Capital gains Long-term capital gains tax rate is 20 per cent
tax on sale of (plus applicable surcharges and cess fees) if held
stocks/ETFs for over 24 months. For ETFs, the long-term
threshold is 36 months
If investment is held for less than 24 months and
profit is booked, then short-term capital gain is
charged according to your income tax slab. Note:
for ETFs, the long-term threshold is 36 months
Tax on Dividends are taxed in the US at a flat rate of 25
dividend per cent. The broker paying the dividend will
subtract 25 per cent taxes before distributing the
remaining 75 per cent to the investor. However,
you can take credit for the dividend tax paid
when filing taxes in India
SOURCE: VESTED FINANCE
withdrawal charges remain the same, this holding as foreign asset in in-
even if one invests a higher amount. come tax returns. So if you are a sala-
So, when investing abroad, a higher ried person, you need to file ITR-2,”
investment will cost you a lot lower. says Sujit Bangar, Founder, Taxbud-
dy.com, a portal for tax return filing
and a tax advisory business.
taxation matrix But what happens if one inher-
We are aware of certain benefits that its foreign shares? The US levies an
taxpayers can avail from investment inheritance tax, or estate tax, at the
in India-listed equities. For example, time of inheritance. However, such
long-term capital gain of up to `1 tax is leviable only if the transferor
lakh is exempt from taxation. Long- is a citizen, resident or a green card
term capital gain exceeding `1 lakh holder of the US. “If a resident Indian
is taxed at a special rate of 10 per cent individual inherits US equities held
only. Short-term capital gain is taxed by his/her parents who were also In-
at a special rate of 15 per cent. Howev- dian citizens, there won’t be any in-
er, these benefits are not available for heritance tax,” says Bangar.
investment in foreign equities.
“Investment in foreign equities
would be considered as any other expert take
asset such as gold, etc. So the gain You don’t need to have an overseas
would be long-term if the holding pe- broking account to invest in inter-
riod is 36 months or more, and the tax national stocks, as there are many
rate would be 20 per cent. Short-term international mutual funds that are
gains would be taxed as per regular available in India. The biggest advan-
slab rates. One more important as- tage of these international funds is
pect to note is that we need to report that you can invest in rupees without
Business Today 23 January 2022
getting into the hassle of remittances
and forex charges.
Top performers such as Motilal
Oswal NASDAQ 100 ETF, Edelweiss
US Value Equity Offshore and Moti-
lal Oswal S&P 500 Index Fund have
given returns of 28.52 per cent, 26.79
per cent and 27.76 per cent, respec-
tively, over the past one year. In com-
parison, individual stocks such as
Google, Apple and Tesla have given
returns of 69 per cent, 33.58 per cent
and 61 per cent, respectively, over the
last one year.
So, which route is better—in-
vesting directly or through mutual
funds? “We see that direct interna-
tional investors churn their port-
folio a lot chasing trends and, thus,
invite capital gains taxes. A passive
international fund would be cheaper
and hassle-free for a vast majority of
investors. However, if your portfolio
value is large and you have the time
to devote to analyse and track foreign | 73
stocks, then by all means invest di-
rectly,” says Gaurav Rastogi, Founder
and Chief Executive Officer, Kuvera.
in, a wealth management platform.
Lovaii Navlakhi, Managing Di-
rector and CEO of financial plan-
ning firm International Money Mat-
ters, says: “We would recommend
that one starts with funds that invest
in global developed markets. The en-
try can be made in a staggered man-
ner and approximately 10-15 per cent
of domestic equity investment can
be allocated to international funds.
Once you get familiar and are com-
fortable with these investments,
take small bites of countrywide or
sectoral allocations, and increase
your exposure and understanding.”
While many might get tempted
to invest in international stocks,
it is advisable to take the plunge
after understanding the costs in-
volved. It best suits people with big
portfolios. For small investors, inter-
national mutual funds could be the
best option.
@Teena_Kaushal
 THE GOOD LIFE
TRENDS TECH TONIC DOWNTIME

74 |

THE SCENT
OF ME Welcome to the
world of bespoke
perfumes, the
ultimate in luxury

BY SMITA TRIPATHI
ILLUSTRATION BY ANIRBAN GHOSH

I
magine having an utterly unique
fragrance composed just for you. De-
signed keeping in mind your loves,
your nature and even how well it sits
on your skin—it is the smell of you.
Welcome to the world of bespoke per-
fumes, the ultimate in luxury.
Smells have the power to evoke
strong memories. The whiff of a
perfume can transport you to child-
hood or remind you of a past love.
Your fragrance can easily become
your signature as it is linked to how
people will remember you. Little
wonder, then, that a one-of-a-kind
distinctive smell is so alluring.
Of course, the Holy Grail of be-
spoke luxury does not come cheap. A
| 75
100 ml bottle can cost you upwards
of `5 lakh, depending on the ingredi-
ents used.
Traditionally, bespoke perfumes
have their roots in Europe where
they were blended chiefly for roy-
alty and wealthy patrons. Across
Europe and the US, there are sev-
eral perfumeries—such as Guerlain
and Jean Patou in Paris, and Kilian
Hennessy in New York—that make
bespoke creations. In London,
Floris, a family-owned perfumery
established in 1730, is the oldest re-
tailer of fragrances in the country,
and is the ‘appointed perfumer’ to
Queen Elizabeth.
In India, it was the Mughals who
 THE GOOD LIFE — TRENDS

introduced perfumery to the coun- need to wear for a week and observe
try. Ittar, natural perfume oil de- how you feel. To know if you really
rived from herbs, flowers and wood, love a fragrance, you need to notice
has been around for over 400 years. how it wears on your skin, if the scent
Ittar (a term with Persian roots) is changes over time as it blends into
still popular in Old Delhi, Lucknow your skin, and how you feel while
and Hyderabad. “Perfumes are an wearing it. The scent is then tweaked
extension of our personality. To as per your feedback, and off you go
have a fragrance made especially for with the sample and wear it for anoth-
you is really quite exclusive,” says er week or 10 days. This to-and-fro
Anil Panda, Co-founder of 3003 BC, happens till you are satisfied with the
a bespoke perfume company that final fragrance and are ready to call it
set up operations in India in 2017. yours. The perfume is handed to you
The company is named so because in a specially-handcrafted bottle and
the earliest reference to perfumes is you even get to name it.
from the Mesopotamian Age. The composition is yours and is
Panda uses a combination of not replicated for anyone else. You
creativity and technology to decode can also order more of the same
your fragrance preferences and de- later. If you go with 3003 BC, it’s
sign a scent that’s unique to you. also cheaper the next time round,
After you answer 10-12 questions says Panda, explaining that it’s cre-
about your olfactory preferences, ating the composition that costs the
personality and the mood you want big bucks.
the perfume to create, 3003 BC’s AI London-based Floris—where
platform analyses several combi- Winston Churchill and Marilyn
nations and creates three samples Monroe got their vials of bespoke
76 | exclusively for you. After trying all perfumes from—offers three ser-
three, you can select any one. Since vices. For £675, you spend two hours 1.
there are hundreds of permutations with a perfumer, choosing from a
and combinations, each sample cre-
ated is unique, says Panda. A 100-ml
bottle costs `7,749, as Panda says he
wants personalised perfumes to be
within people’s reach.
However, if you want the real deal,
an appointment can be fixed with
British perfumer John Stephen, who
has over four decades of experience,
and counts Queen Elizabeth and the
late Prince Philip amongst his clients.
With Stephen, personalisation is
a lengthy process and can take around
16-24 weeks. It starts with filling out a
form to get a sense of the type of scent
you are looking for, the ingredients
you are drawn to, and so forth. And
this is just the starting point. Stephen
then has a detailed conversation with
you about your memories, moods
and feelings. You could maybe de-
scribe to him the scent of a favourite
aunt or your passion for horse riding.
The challenge lies in him translating
your ephemeral descriptions into a
blend of flowers and oils. Stephen 2.
then creates a few samples that you

Business Today 23 January 2022

 wide variety of fragrance bases. Once
you have identified a fragrance direc-
tion, the perfumer will work with you
and tweak the perfume to refine your
composition till it is as per your lik-
ing. This then becomes your bespoke
scent. Its second service is called ‘To-
gether’ and is meant for couples. For
£1,100, you have the opportunity to
create two completely bespoke fra-
grances. Its third service, Bespoke
Perfume Design, allows you to design
your perfume over six months. You
work closely with Director Edward
Bodenham—who is also the ninth-
generation descendant of Floris
Founder Juan Famenias Floris—and
develop a perfume that is uniquely
you. For £6,000, you get six 100-ml
bottles. Once the perfume is created,
your custom fragrance formula is ar-
chived in the Floris ledgers for you or
your future generations to reorder.
On average, a bottle of perfume
has between 30 and 40 ingredients.
These can vary in price, from a few
thousand rupees per kg to several | 77
lakhs. Oud, made from agarwood,
is one of the most expensive per-
fume ingredients known to the hu-
man nose. A kilo of oud oil costs `21
1. A bespoke
lakh, says Panda. There are other ex-
perfume being
made at London- pensive ingredients as well such as
based Floris, a Bulgarian rose oil (around `12 lakh
family-owned per kilo) and natural tobacco oil (`9
perfumery lakh per kilo).
established in A perfumery typically has nearly
1730, which is a thousand ingredients. Stephen
the ‘appointed says maintaining consistency is a
perfumer’ to Queen challenge. You would expect a per-
Elizabeth fume to smell the same every time,
2. To know if but when you are dealing with natu-
you really love a ral materials, they may vary with
fragrance, you need weather and, hence, change.
to notice how it While a perfume ages con-
wears on your skin stantly, the rate of change slows
and how you feel down over time. The biggest change
while wearing it
in a fragrance takes place in the first
3. Bespoke perfume 24 hours. Stephen recommends
company 3003 BC keeping perfumes in a cool place
uses a combination (below 30 degrees) as the low tem-
of creativity and perature slows down chemical reac-
technology to tions, and the perfume continues to
decode your unique
smell the same.
fragrance
3.
@smitabw

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE GOOD LIFE — TECH TONIC
STAY FIT
AND FINE
These nifty gadgets will keep your
New Year fitness resolutions on track
BY NIDHI SINGAL
FITNESS
COMPANION
Be it to jump-start your fit-
ness routine, help you track
your workout or keep an eye
on your vital stats, the Apple
Watch does it all. It’s great at
recording workouts, guided
78 | breathing sessions, measuring
ECG, heart rate and even blood
oxygen levels. Supporting a
wide range of workouts includ-
ing walks, jogging, swimming,
yoga, core training and Tai
Chi—to name a few—the activ-
ity rings show the day’s activi-
ties at a glance. What I love the
most is when the watch re-
minds me to walk a little more
to complete my day’s goal.
`14,999
The Fitbit
Charge 5 works
with both iOS
and Android
The Breathe app is great
for mindful breathing and
relaxing, something I use a
lot when I am stressed. The
blood oxygen measure-
ment, heart rate monitor-
ing and ECG are bang on
(despite this not being a Apple Watch Series 7
medical device). Unlike
`41,900 onwards
most bands that automati-
cally record sleep cycles, The device supports a wide range
this one doesn’t. Instead, of workouts and tracks vital stats
it helps you in developing
a healthy sleeping pattern
by suggesting you set up
a sleep schedule, activate help you relax). But mind you, the Apple
sleep mode and wind down Watch works only with iPhones.
(to reduce distractions and Available on: apple.com/in
Band of Health
If you’re not a watch person, then consider some-
thing like the Fitbit Charge 5. With close to seven
days of battery backup, it can track around 20
workouts and body stats in real-time. It also comes
with built-in GPS, stress management, 24x7 heart
rate monitor, SpO2, etc. Just like the Apple Watch,
this measures your ECG (but via an app). The de-
vice is comfortable to wear as well, even to track
your sleep. It works with both iOS and Android.
Available on: fitbit.com
Business Today 23 January 2022
 ROWING THE OCEANS
This smart rowing machine with magnetic resistance will let you explore
different oceans and lakes around the world virtually. With deliveries start-
ing in February, it will come with more than 30 virtual experiences.

DON’T SKIP IT
Available on: theflexnest.com

 TANGRAM FACTORY `32,999

SMARTROPE ROOKIE The Flexnest
~`5,000 Flexrower lets
you explore and
Skipping is a great full-body exercise
workout for adults. And
when you use this skipping
rope, it records each
complete revolution of the
rope as a complete jump,
as well as monitors calories
burnt and workout times. It
ships to India.
Available on: tangramfactory.
com

Look Beyond Your Weight

DRINK UP Regular scales help you watch your
weight, but the GOQii Balance | 79
 HidrateSpark 3 comes with a body composition
~`10,000 monitor to measure weight, muscle
mass, BMI, bone mass, body fat,
Helping you to stay hydrated, water content, body score, basal
this bottle not only tracks metabolism and visceral fat. The
water intake, but also has an Balance comes with 3 months
LED smart sensor stick that of personal coaching where a
glows to remind you it’s time human coach will guide you about
to drink water. Just pair it `3,299 improving your food habits and
with its app. The GOQii exercise routine.
Available on: amazon.in Balance is more Available on: goqii.com
than just a weigh-
ing scale

HOME RUN
 NURVV Run
~`25,000
If you’re into running, this
smart insole will measure
the activity from the point of
impact and provide insights,
guidance and coaching to
help you run smarter and
train healthier.
Available on: nurvv.com
BREATHE EASY
LUMEN METABOLISM
~`21,500
Just breathe out. That’s all it takes for this
handheld, portable device to measure your
metabolism. It discovers what fuel source
the body is using for energy, fats or carbs,
and helps make actionable changes to reach
weight, fitness and metabolic goals. It even
gives daily customised meal plans based on
the metabolism rate. And it ships to India.
Available on: lumen.me

Business Today 23 January 2022

 THE GOOD LIFE — DOWNTIME

OUT
PHOTOGRAPH BY RAJWANT RAWAT

OF THE
BOX
For a CEO, Divya Jain uses
the most uncommon tool for
meditation and focus:
she throws punches, literally

BY SMITA TRIPATHI

B
oxing is meditative for me.
It’s something that requires
your mind and body to work
80 | together,” says 38-year-old
Divya Jain, Founder and
CEO of Safeducate, and
Co-founder of Seekho. The
London School of Economics alumna—who
runs one of the largest initiatives for skilling
in logistics, which has skilled over 250,000
students in the past eight years—says what
makes boxing attractive is that you always
need to be attentive. “If you are running, you
can let your mind wander, but that’s not true
for boxing. In boxing, if you stop looking, you
are going to get a whack,” she smiles. “What I
love is that you leave everything aside and just
concentrate on the skill, and are aware of the
now. Boxing has really helped me sharpen my
brain. If I box, I have a better day,” says Jain,
the recipient of the ASEAN Young Woman
Achiever Award in 2018.
Jain, who decided not to join the family
business— logistics and express distribution
company Safexpress—has been boxing for the
past two-and-a-half years. “It happened by
chance. A new ring had opened near my house
where they were experimenting with boxing

READY FOR ACTION: Jain, who has been

boxing for the past two-and-a-half years, set up
a ring at home in 2020 due to the pandemic

Business Today 23 January 2022

as a fitness form. I decided to give it
a shot. And it has become a passion
now,” says Jain, who set up a boxing
ring at home in Delhi in 2020 when
gyms and fight clubs were shut. “Ir-
respective of which part of the world
I am in, I spend the first two hours
after waking up boxing,” she says.
Jain is also promoting young girls
to box. They are trained at her ring at
home. “We identify young girls who
have been fighting a little bit and are
trying to promote them to fight in PHOTOGRAPH BY MANDAR DEODHAR
the nationals and, hopefully, take
them international,” she says, add- PRIZED POSSESSION The chairman of Mogae Media has around 350
ing, “It is so empowering to be able to mugs in his office collected over a couple of decades on trips abroad
protect and defend yourself.”

THE MAN WITH

“What I love is that
you leave everything
aside and just
concentrate on the
skill, and are aware
of the now. Boxing
has really helped me
sharpen my brain”
In early 2021, Jain set up Seekho,
a video-first platform where young
professionals and college students
can learn any skill on the go. “My
entire life ties in. When you box, you
are learning new skills. A lot of the
philosophy that I learn in boxing I
have applied in Seekho. How do you
build skills, how do you constantly
train your body and mind,” says
Jain, a mother of two. A boxer needs
to be strong, as well as flexible, she
says. “Muhammad Ali said, ‘Float
like a butterfly, sting like a bee’. So
you need to be powerful but agile,”
says Jain, who spars for 10-12 hours a
week with her coach and maintains
a low-carb, high-protein diet. “Box-
ing gives you awareness about your
body. I am trying to introduce my
kids to it,” says Jain, who has also
been flirting with jujutsu. “But my
heart is in boxing.”
@smitabw
THE MUGS
For Sandeep Goyal, adding to his extensive
collection of Toby mugs is a passion
BY SMITA TRIPATHI
For 59-year-old adman Sandeep
Goyal, Chairman, Mogae Media, his
collection of Toby mugs is a prized
possession. A Toby mug, or jug, is
a figural ceramic pitcher modelled
in the form of a popular charac-
ter—historical, fictional or generic.
“Toby mugs are the original form of
what we today call ‘merchandise’.
They were born primarily as an
extension of theatre,”
says Goyal, who has
around 350 of them
in his office collected
over a couple of de-
cades on trips abroad.
It all started in the
late 1990s when he
saw and liked the col-
lection of a friend’s fa-
ther in the UK. “He had
49 of them then, each one gifted
by his wife on their anniversary. He
told me he would will them to me,”
recalls Goyal. Sure enough, a cou-
ple of years later, he found himself
in possession of 51 mugs. “I was tak-
en aback by the gesture. It seemed
like divine intervention,” says Goyal,
who then started collecting them.
Today, the 51 bequeathed ones
are kept in his house in Mumbai,
while the 350-odd that he has
| 81
collected are in his office. “They
are difficult to come by. I gener-
ally search for them in pawn shops
and antique stores abroad.” Till a
few years ago, Goyal would pick up
three-four mugs on every trip. Pric-
es vary from a few British pounds
to £200-300. “If I was to sell mine,
I would get a neat packet.”
Goyal’s collection is so large
that he sometimes
makes the mistake
of buying one he al-
ready has. But he has
also lost around 40-
50 mugs. “They are
fragile. Every time
one breaks in transit,
my mood is spoilt,”
says Goyal, who ac-
quired the ad agency
Rediffusion in May 2021.
Owner of one of the largest col-
lections of Toby mugs in the coun-
try, Goyal admits that taking care of
them is not easy. “But I have them
in my office, and the collection
serves as a great ice-breaker. More
importantly, I see them every day
and they make me happy.”
@smitabw

Business Today 26 December 2021

 The Best Advice I Ever Got
NEVIL PATEL I DIRECTOR I ORPAT GROUP

What was the problem you were

grappling with?
The pandemic led to an inevitable and unfore-
seen halt in production in 2020. The busi-
ness suffered and we were unable to remedy
the situation because of the restrictions. Our
numbers dwindled and many of our employ-
ees also suffered from health challenges as a
result of the pandemic.

Whom did you approach for advice?

My parents and grandparents. Their experi-
ence and wisdom proved to be priceless even
in a never-seen-before situation such as this.

What was the advice you received?

My elders, especially my father, have always
taught me to have a people-first approach—
to think about them, and for them. Even my
82 | grandparents conveyed that it is important to
give people who helped us due credit and not
step on them on the pretext of moving for-
ward. Our best assets are our hard work and
humility, which when mixed with care for peo-
ple around us, have the ability to move moun-
tains. Our aim has always been to put India on
the global industrial map and it fills me with
pride that we are now among the top industry
leaders. Respect for all, hard work, transparen-
cy and honesty were their virtues, and some-
thing that I imbibe within me every day.

How effective was it in resolving the

problem?
The advice helped us add dexterity to our
everyday operations without having to worry
about going the wrong way. Transparency has
helped us maintain efficient operations and,

‘Always have
of course, our loyal workforce has been with
us for years on end. They are like our family
and the family stayed put through the course

a people-first
of the difficulty.
—Vidya S.

approach’
Vol. 31, No. 2 for the fortnight
January 10, 2022 to January 23, 2022.
Released on January 10, 2022.
Total number of pages 84 (including cover)

Business Today 23 January 2022

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