Afleveringen
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A decade ago, when platforms like Urban Company entered the scene, they were seen the beacon of hope for thousands of women like Selvi and Nisha, two beauticians based in in Bangalore—finally, an avenue that offered them the financial independence and support their families without the cost flexibility. Now, over one third of the platform's workers are female making it the largest employer of women gig workers in India.
But in the last few years, the same workers have been raising their voices against the unfair nature of their job—from the one-sided ratings system of the app that makes female gig workers entirely dependent on customers and the arbitrary blocking of their accounts to the lack of basic safety and more.
Their requests and demands seem to be falling in to deaf years. The Ken reached out to Urban Company with questions regarding these issues but so far we haven't received any response.
In today’s episode, we will try to understand why Selvi, Nisha and thousands like them are so angry with the very company that was once a source of freedom for them.
Tune in.
Episode cover art by Kavipriya OG
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two here
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For more than two decades, India’s jewellery industry has been dominated by one name and one name only – Tanishq. The Titan-owned brand has managed to become the go-to jewellery store for people across the country. Some may even call it the gold standard, literally.
But since last year, things have been changing. Tanishq’s dominance is being challenged. Not by some massive international player or any other pan-India brand. Nope. Instead, it is regional players that are starting to dim Tanishq’s shine. You may have noticed all the Malabar Gold and Kalyan Jewellers ads and billboards that have popped up in the last year or so. Both are regional brands that have really been giving Tanishq a run for its money.
The funny thing is all of these regional brands have risen to the top by doing exactly what Tanishq does best. They are literally hijacking Tanishq’s own playbook. And in the process, what was once Titan’s exclusive territory, with its 8% market share in a sea of unorganised competition, is now getting crowded.
Tune in.**This episode was first published on August 20, 2024
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Bloomberg recently published a damning report about Byju’s according to which Byju Raveendran, the edtech’s founder, allegedly tried to convince an American businessman to leave the country so he wouldn't have to testify in a federal court about the suspicious activities he saw while working for the edtech.
However, William R Hailer, the businessman, filed a declaration in the US Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where he said: ““Raveendran arranged a ticket for me to Dubai on Emirates out of Chicago Illinois to avoid testifying and to be out of the country as an excuse if required to testify.”
Now, if you’ll remember, in Sept this year, the highest court in Delaware, USA had upheld a ruling by a lower court that said the edtech firm Byju’s had indeed defaulted on infamous $1.5 billion loan. Which basically meant , that the lenders could demand full repayment, and take control of Byju’s US entity Byju’s Alpha Inc, and also appoint Timothy Pohl, Alpha Inc’s court-appointed CEO, as its sole director.
In this episode based on the latest edition of The Ken's newsletter Ed Set Go, we delve into the latest twist in the Byju's saga.
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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In the June quarter of 2024, Honasa Consumer, the maker of Mamaearth, decided to launch this new project called Project Neev. The idea was to bring about a foundational change in the way the company operates, especially distribution.
For context, Mamaearth hit the bourses in October last year when everyone else who had IPO plans had decided to hold them off for a bit. But Varun Alagh, the CEO and co-founder of Mamaearth, was of the firm opinion that the timing was perfectly ripe.
Things seemed to be going alright until this month when Honasa Consumer reported its first loss ever since it went public. Everything points to the massive change in the company’s distribution strategy. It decided to dump all its super-stockists or distributors for an in-house sales team that would take care of it. Basically, all the middlemen were kicked out.
The company estimated a one-time hit of Rs 50 crore in inventory losses because of this shift. But Alagh himself admitted in an interview with The Economic Times that the real damage was closer to Rs 70 crore.
And former distributors allege that the real picture is much worse. They estimate that there are stocks worth Rs 300 crores lying unsold and unclaimed.
In today’s episode, we’ll delve deeper into what this change in distribution strategy has led to for Mamaearth and its former stockists.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Regular CBSE schools just don’t cut it anymore for the aspirational middle class parents in India. But considering how the annual fees at most of these schools can range anywhere between Rs 3 lakh to Rs 25 lakh, sending a child to one of them is no joke. Almost 90 per cent of parents who take the step can’t afford to pay the full fees up front. In fact, for most, even paying half the fee in one go is not an option.
In come the fintechs. Companies like Grayquest, Jodo and Leo1 are partnering with a growing number of schools to offer a simple solution to these aspirational parents – zero cost EMIs.
How does it work? And what’s in it for the fintechs?
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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The world of cyber fraud has gotten even murkier thanks to a slick new tech service that is streamlining fraud for scammers and making them even harder to track down. This new concept is called ‘Mule-as-a-service’ or MaaS. It’s kind of like a plug-and-play fraud tech where service providers are able to deploy an army of mules on behalf of cybercriminals. These mules are people who lend their bank accounts to move dirty money for cybercriminals. The scary thing is this mule network is getting smarter about leaving no money trail for authorities to follow.
More often than not, these mules are ordinary people from low income groups who sign up to make a quick buck, without realising just how dangerous the whole business is.
Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel are joined by The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan and Dhiraj Gupta, co-founder of the fraud-protection firm MfilterIt, about how this network works and why regulators have been struggling to keep up.
Tune in.
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If you’ve ever taken a loan from a non bank or an NBFC, the EMI is usually auto-debited from your account every month. But if you missed a payment, you know what usually goes down. You are inundated with phone calls from your lender and maybe agents even start visiting your home. Not an ideal situation for you or your lender.
But now, your lender can just monitor your account and deduct the money as soon as it comes into your account…all thanks to that auto-debit permission you granted. Earlier, only a bank could do this when it lent money to its account holder. But now non-banks can do it, too. A fintech executive told The Ken that this tool will soon become business as usual in every lender’s tool box. But things are still not there yet since the banks are not predictably sharing the statement data or their servers are down.
And here’s where account aggregators come into the picture. These aggregators are a newly-created class of licensed companies by the Reserve Bank of India. They basically help businesses exchange financial information about a user after taking the user’s consent.
Meanwhile, Navi Finserv, a four-year-old non-bank, was quite particular about how fast it could help its users take out a loan. Navi’s co-founder and CEO Sachin Bansal—who previously co-founded the Flipkart —believes “banking should be as easy as going on Swiggy and ordering food”. So to amp up both disbursals and collections, Navi and others like it are counting on account aggregators. But being able to access a borrower’s bank statement at any given time is a powerful collection tool.
And the problem is how Navi has been using this power.
Tune in.
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Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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In many ways, electric vehicles today are where mobile phones were in the early 2000s.
It’s December 2002. Mobile phones have entered the market, but the average Indian is still pretty sceptical. Cell phone connections are patchy and more importantly expensive. Devices themselves were unwieldy, limited and again…expensive. Basic services like sending a text, or a voice mail, or call waiting were considered ‘add-on services’ and they needed to be purchased separately.
So most people thought it just wasn’t worth the investment. That was until Reliance came in and changed everything. Back then, Mukesh Ambani launched Infocomm. The idea was to make telephone calls in India as cheap as sending a postcard. And it worked. Slowly, as costs started to drop, more and more people saw sense in adopting mobile phones, and eventually abandoning landlines altogether.This episode is by no means a history lesson. But that context was important. Because India is almost exactly where it was back then. Except, the device they are on the fence about is now electric vehicles. And the company in question now is JSW MG Motor. Funnily enough, the solutions that JSW is coming up with are eerily similar to the Reliance strategy back then.
It's biggest proposition? A subscription plan for your EV battery.
Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Cloud, streaming, generative AI… while all of these are increasingly becoming hot topics of discussion, data centres—the large, boxy buildings that house high-powered computers—are looking for innovative solutions to stay cool.
The advent of GPU processing has opened an opportunity for a handful of foreign companies to throw their hat into the ring. Their proposition? Liquid cooling.
So far, air cooling has been the preferred way to keep data centres cool. Like its name suggests, it is the process of using air to keep these centres cool. Liquid cooling does just that but with water.
It’s more efficient and largely believed to be a better way of cooling. But change does not come easy. Many data centre operators here in India believe it is riskier than air cooling. But with AI technology advancing the way that it is and GPUs growing more popular, they may soon not have a choice.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Hurun India began curating rich lists a decade ago. Now, it has moved up ahead of ranking giants like Bloomberg and Forbes with 17 lists so far. It has a Global 500 list, similar to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. In fact, at this point, its safe to say that it has replaced Forbes as the most trusted choice for bankers and wealth managers. Hurun has managed to turn showing it off into a cultural trend despite the fact that wealth is often wrapped in secrecy in a country like India. So what's really driving India's obsession with ranking the richest?
Hurun India has grown way beyond its original rich lists, creating rankings for just about everything you can think of—from self-made entrepreneurs to top art collectors. They even track billionaires by zodiac signs.Today we look at Hurun India beyond just these lists— a closer look at the behind the scenes relationship it has with wealth-management firms, and how it keeps the ultra-rich happy
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Last Sunday, the Daybreak team joined a run club! Why, you ask? For research, of course.
We wanted to understand the recent run club renaissance, that has taken social media by storm since the beginning of the year. Run clubs, in the traditional sense, have been around for decades now. But now, something has shifted. The new generation of runners is younger, less experienced, and relentlessly social.
Young people are looking for new avenues to meet people in real life and to connect offline. This isn't just limited to running. Social clubs in general are really having their moment. These are clubs that are centred around an activity — like hiking, painting, reading, even knitting. In search of meaningful relationships, sometimes even love, they are putting down their phones and pursuing hobbies like never before.
But what led to this sudden resurgence of social clubs? Was it the pandemic? Loneliness? Social media fatigue? Or something else entirely?
Tune in to find out.
Special thank you to the 56 Run Club for collaborating with us for this episode. You can follow them on Instagram to get the latest updates on their runs and events.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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On November 13, food delivery giant Swiggy made its public debut. It listed with a 8% premium over its IPO price of Rs 390 on NSE at Rs 420 and was oversubscribed by nearly four times.
While it's a bit early to comment, investors are not making strong bets on it yet. Hust to give you context, when Zomato went public, its IPO was oversubscribed by 38 times. This could be because the company is still posting losses on a consolidated level and is expected to be 2-3 years away from reaching profitability. It took Swiggy nine years till its food delivery business finally turned profitable last year.
Today, we revisit an episode of Daybreak in which we’d talked about what was happening behind the scenes of Swiggy’s IPO preparation.Tune in.
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Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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For quite a while now, the Indian startup ecosystem has really been feeling the pinch. People in the know call it the funding winter. These are periods of tremendous financial insecurity for startups, particularly now.
You see, for the last five years ago, the startup funding culture here in India was like a rollercoaster that was only going up. But now the scenario has changed considerably. After a dream run, big-ticket equity funding has slowed down and once sky high valuations are very quickly coming back to Earth.
These startups still need the money, obviously. But they have realised that raising a round of funding may not be as easy as it once was.
But they have found their knight in shining armour. In comes ‘venture debt’. These are essentially loans that go to VC-backed startups. A lot of the startups in the Indian ecosystem are thirsty, and venture debt is increasingly proving to be the refreshing splash they needed amid this funding drought.
But there's a catch.
Tune in.
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories. -
Last year, Nykaa decided to reshuffle its marketing structure after the company’s previous Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) exited the company.
Instead of immediately filling the spot, Nykaa decided to break the role apart and have two marketing heads. One to look at performance marketing – the more technically, data-driven side of e-commerce, and another as the head of organic marketing – the creative, freewheeling stuff.
The move sent out a clear message: a singular CMO is no longer necessary.This isn’t exclusive to Nykaa. Several online-first companies – Firstcry, Ixigo, Yatra – have been running without a CMO. But for decades CMOs have been seen as the charming, confident face of the company responsible for all things brand-building.
What's changed?
Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Last month, in October 2024, the government of India launched the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, a health insurance coverage for all senior citizens aged 70 and over, regardless of income. This is big news for healthcare in India because for the longest time, this is exactly the age group that has pvt insurance companies have been ignoring.
To give you a clearer picture, a person aged over 60 years pays anything between Rs 30,000–50,000 as annual premium for coverage as low as 5 lakh rupees. Even policies for Rs 6–10 lakh are harder to find and cost Rs 40,000–70,000 annually. That’s about 5X the premium someone younger would pay for the same coverage. And it’s not just the high premiums; these policies are of little help to seniors when they need it the most.
In fact, more than four out of every five people aged above 60 aren’t covered by any insurance at all. Only 20% of those over 45 years have a health cover. And the rest are just out there vulnerable to emergencies. The reason being: high premiums and meagre coverage.
Tune in.
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Ever since the pandemic, the world of skincare has witnessed nothing short of a revolution. Almost overnight, that jar of Ponds cold cream that had stood the test of time on dressing tables across the country was replaced by elaborate six-step skincare routines.
The legacy brands we grew up with – the likes of Loreal, Ponds, Johnson and Johnson – were dethroned almost overnight. In their place came an explosion of new brands. Today, everyone wants some skin in the game. Traditional FMCG companies like Tata, Marico, Dabur and Godrej all want in. So much so, that it's hard to keep a tab on the list of D2C skincare brands available in the market now.
But what does it take to launch a skincare brand? Turns out, not a lot. All you need is a contract manufacturer, 30 days, and a penchant for marketing.
Tune in.
We are hosting our first live recording! If you are in your 20s, like to run or just enjoy meeting new people, sign up for The Ken X 56 Run Club. This is for our Bengaluru-based listeners only. We meet at 7:30 am near Tonique on Kasturba Gandhi road.
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Lately, new breed of millionaire heirs have been dabbling with family offices in India . These are entities that exist solely to manage the fortunes of these ultra-rich families. While these offices have been around in some of the world’s biggest financial capitals for a long time now, in India, they are catching on now . What’s really interesting is that these single and multi family offices haven’t just been popping up in big metro cities, they are also gaining popularity in tier 2 cities like Surat, Ludhiana, Lucknow, Coimbatore and the like.
This largely has to do with the growing number of rich people in a lot of smaller cities and towns. A byproduct of this seems to be the rise in family offices. In the last six years alone, the number of family offices in India has shot up from 45 to 300.
Some of these function like a seed-stage venture capital firm and invest money to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Tune in.
**Correction: In this episode the host mistakenly referred to Nishant Batra as someone who leads investments at Catamaran, whereas he works for Dholakia Ventures. We apologise for the error.
Daybreak Unwind recommendations for 'favourite translated novels.'
Rahel: The Vegetarian by Han King
Hangwoman by KR MeeraSnigdha: The Legends of Khasak by OV Vijayan
There's a Carnival Today by Indra Bahadur RaiListeners: Ghachar Ghochar by Vivek Shanbag
Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Here’s a riddle inspired by true events. We all know that pay TV subscribers have been declining for a while now. But at the same time, overall TV viewership has only been increasing. How can that be?
Well, for that we have Youtube to thank. In the first half of 2024, Indians spent 8 trillion minutes watching videos. More than 90% of this was on Youtube. Now, generally when someone says the words ‘watch on youtube’ you imagine a mobile phone or a laptop right? That seems to be changing as a lot more people are watching Youtube videos on their TV sets. In Uttar Pradesh alone, Youtube reaches about 90 million households through connected television sets.
And here’s the surprising part. This is roughly equal to or more than the reach of television programming.
Youtube is now entering TV territory, by luring viewers into watching new format shows. Like comedian Samay Raina’s “pointless reality show” India’s got latent. Eight episodes have been aired since June, and so far, they’ve gotten up to 4X more views than the channel’s nearly 4 million subscriber base.
Many similar Youtube channels are offering their subscribers TV like programming to keep them hooked. Plus, what makes them really stand out is that most often than not, these shows are better produced, that too on cheaper budgets.
Looks like its time for TV channels to buckle up and fight for the throne...or couch!
Tune in.
We are hosting our first live recording! If you are in your 20s, like to run or just enjoy meeting new people, sign up for The Ken X 56 Run Club. This is for our Bengaluru-based listeners only. We meet at 7:30 am near Tonique on Kasturba Gandhi road. -
Last month, India’s second largest automaker – Hyundai – went public. But this was not your run of the mill IPO. This was widely speculated to be the largest public listing ever seen in the Indian stock market. So there was naturally a lot of hype around it.
But on October 17, just hours before Hyundai’s public issue was set to close, most stock market circles across the country were stumped. There was a growing sense of disbelief. Panic even. Because only half of the nearly Rs 28,000 crore offer had been subscribed until then. This was a far cry from the 90 per cent threshold that had to be crossed.
The IPO eventually had a pretty listless listing on October 22. Despite all that hype.Now naturally, that left a lot of people wondering what could have gone wrong? What prompted so many retail investors to keep away from the Hyundai IPO?
Well, a lot of it had to do with what transpired in Rajkot in the run-up to issue. This isn’t just about Hyundai. This small city in Gujarat has a big role to play in India’s IPO market.
Tune in.
We are hosting our first live recording! If you are in your 20s, like to run or just enjoy meeting new people, sign up for The Ken X 56 Run Club. This is for our Bengaluru-based listeners only.
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A new generation of designers is on the rise. These designers are expected to be a lot more than just “one trick ponies”. The new-age ‘Designer X’ is expected to bring a little bit of everything to the table. They understand the basics of sustainability, how their designs would impact things like climate change and culture. And they would also generally know a little bit of coding too.
And that is because the whole perception of design has shifted. Just last month, IIT Delhi announced a new certificate course in design thinking. It quoted multiple reports explaining why aspirants should take it. One of them was a 2023 Deloitte report that said companies that integrated design thinking in their innovation process brought new products to market 50 per cent faster than others and saw 2.5 X more revenue growth.
The latest batch of design generalists are the products of a new era of design education that has been sweeping through India’s universities. As of now, about a dozen have started their own design schools. Some of these universities are leaning into the industry’s demand for a well-rounded designer.
But now that more universities have entered the picture and generalist designers are becoming a dime a dozen, landing good jobs is going to get tougher as the job market matures.
Tune in.Daybreak is now on WhatsApp at +918971108379. Text us and tell us what you thought of the episode!
Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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