Business, Biotech & Brand Battles: A Story of Three Shifts | Who said What? S2E1
Hi folks, Krishna here! If you're one of those lovely people who left comments asking where is "Who said what?," thank you so much—I hope that helps me get a better appraisal. For those of you who are new here, welcome to the second season of Who said what.
The idea behind the show remains the same–we pick the most interesting and juiciest comments from business leaders, fund managers and the likes and contextualise things around it.
With that out of the way I have 3 comments for you from Rajeev Thakkar to JSW’s Parth Jindal and the very futuristic George Church.
Rajeev Thakkar vs FMCG CEOs
It’s been about a year since I really started paying close attention to the news — listening to earnings calls, reading transcripts, and watching what company managements are saying. And one thing that stood out almost immediately was how many FMCG CEOs kept repeating the same thing: there’s a slowdown in consumption, the middle class is shrinking, demand is weak — that sort of stuff.
And honestly, it made sense. If you looked at the numbers — volume growth vs PAT growth — the gap was clear. Plus, these are the people closest to the customer. They’re in the weeds.
Over the past year, India's FMCG leaders have expressed growing concerns about the shrinking urban middle class. Nestlé India Chairman Suresh Narayanan observed that the middle segment, which historically formed the core customer base for FMCG companies, appears to be diminishing.
This sentiment was reinforced by Hindustan Unilever CEO Rohit Jawa, who noted that overall FMCG volume growth has decelerated, reflecting weakened demand, with urban markets continuing to slow even as rural areas show signs of gradual recovery.
Colgate-Palmolive India's MD & CEO Prabha Narasimhan pinpointed the issue more precisely, stating that the bottom 70% of urban India is experiencing significant pressure, which is dragging down overall volume growth.
So I was pretty much convinced. But then I came across something Rajeev Thakkar, CIO of Parag Parikh Mutual Fund, said in a recent chat with Moneycontrol — and it really made me think. He said:
“Let me argue that there's no consumption slowdown.”
It’s a bold statement. He explained that it’s not that people aren’t spending — it’s that they’re spending elsewhere. A D2C shoe brand gets an order, and a listed retailer loses one. IPL tickets sell out, but multiplexes sit empty. Streaming services boom, while footfalls drop in theatres.
You could poke out holes in this argument but it’s definitely a fresh perspective, especially when almost every FMCG CEO over the past few quarters has echoed the same concerns.
If Rajeev is right, the implication is clear: maybe it’s time to stop blaming the consumer and start examining whether legacy FMCG players have lost their relevance in parts of the market. The alpha might lie with those adapting to new demand patterns, not just riding old brand power.
But if the CEOs are right, maybe it’s just a cyclical phase. In that case, patience — and possibly rural-focused plays — might pay off.
What do you think is happening?
Why did AkzoNobel quit India?
So, there has been a lot of chatter on JSW acquiring Akzo Nobel.
In an interview with NDTV Profi, JSW Paints' Parth Jindal finally revealed what drove them to chase this deal:
"When Akonobel Global announced their strategic review last year, we felt this was too good an opportunity not to really go forward—not to really fight for. If we truly want to become a top-three player, this was the natural partner."
In October 2024, AkzoNobel announced they were rethinking their whole business.
They wanted to focus on industrial coatings i.e. the kind of stuff that goes on cars, planes, and ships which is their main money-maker globally. This was a pretty clear hint they might sell off their house paints business, since that's not really their core strength.
While the JSW-AkzoNobel acquisition is indeed significant, there’s a broader pattern at play here. Over recent decades, many foreign paint giants—including Sherwin-Williams, Nippon Paint (which scaled back significantly), and now AkzoNobel—have reduced their presence or exited the Indian decorative paint market altogether. Clearly, something distinct is unfolding.
India’s paint industry functions very differently from the global norm. Domestically, decorative paints—consumer-focused products for homes and commercial spaces—drive demand. Internationally, however, non-decorative, industrial, and specialized coatings dominate markets. Indian paint companies primarily build powerful consumer brands, relying on marketing and extensive distribution networks. Globally, major paint companies are seen more as chemical and industrial entities, so consumers might even be unaware of their existence.
I had no idea about this until Kashish told me this his from his conversations with fund managers. Check out the full conversation here.
And, this is not just me just saying it. This was amplified by Akzo Nobel’s CEO as well, in an interview with ET:
“As a multinational, we were at times distracted. We weren’t capitalising enough on the value of the brands or the quality of our products. What we missed was the ability to take that promise and transform it into business and market share.”
In essence, he basically pinpointed precisely what foreign players frequently miss in India which is deep local market insights and agility.
I mean, paints might look boring - but when you see India's biggest companies fighting tooth and nail to buy AkzoNobel, you know something big is happening. The Indian paint market is actually a battlefield right now, and everyone wants in.
The future of genetic engineering
Dwarkesh is one of our favourite internet nerds. We’ve stumbled upon a lot of the more futuristic stuff we talk about on his podcast. And recently, he came out with another absolute banger — a 90+ minute conversation with the superstar geneticist, George Church.
Dr. Church is a pioneer of genetic engineering. Both his admirers and his critics claim that he has a habit of playing God — only, his admirers are awed by what he does, while his critics think he’s reaching too far. A lot of his work is around playing with the genetic code of living things to see what’s possible. Only recently, his company, Colossal Biosciences, re-created the Dire Wolf — an extinct animal that you’ve probably only seen on Game of Thrones.
I mean, he’s made the idea of extinction, extinct.
Their interview is chock-ful of very interesting ideas on what the future of biology might hold: they talk about everything from humans becoming functionally immortal by 2050, to how one “nanofactories” where living thingscould in theory replace every cell in your body to reverse aging, to how you could create are designed to build complex machines. The conversation is really worth getting into.
Now, we know nothing about this space. To us, this was a primer on all that might be possible within our lifetimes. We thought we’d just share some of the cooler bits with you.
For one, Dr. Church thinks we’re at the verge of a biotech revolution:
“We have something that's about the same speed, a little bit faster than Moore's Law in biology... We have the biotech industry, which has used that exponential curve to get better. It's also possible we're close to the big payoff is the other aspect, or the beginning of the big payoff. Right now we have miraculous things like cures for rare diseases. We have vaccines. We have a trillion dollars, probably, of various biotech related things if you go far enough apart. We're on the verge of really combining electronics and biology more thoroughly, and AI and biotech. It seems like we're on the same track as Moore's law, if not better.”
A Moore’s law for biology? Think about that! Think about how much computers have changed in our parents’ lives — from room-sized mammoths that ran on punch-cards to the sleek black rectangle you’re probably watching this on. We might see something similar in our own lifetimes, but this time, the technology in question might be living things.
Here’s something that will give you a sense of the possibilities:
“In principle, evolution might incorporate a few base pair changes in a million years. Now we can make billions of changes in an afternoon. It's all guided in such a way that you get rid of the wastefulness of having a bunch of neutral mutations and a bunch of lethal mutations.”
You can literally create billions of new possibilities of how living things may look in the course of a single afternoon. You can see what works, ditch everything else, and iterate further.
That’s not just a matter of changing how organisms live. You can use the same ideas for other things. We’re on the path to programming living things to make any microscopic object we want:
“...think about what we would call the 1 nanometer process... It's not really 1 nanometer, it's more like 40 nanometers, center-to-center spacing, typically in two dimensions, maybe a little bit of three dimensions. Biology is already at 0.4 nanometer resolution and it is in three dimensions. Depending on how you count that third dimension, it could be a billion times higher density that biology is already at.”
Computer chips are some of the most complicated things we are capable of making. If we can get living things to build nanomaterials for us, we could build things many orders of magnitude more complex.
We already use bacterial cultures to engineer things like organic molecules or even vaccines. Some day, you might just have manufacturing biobots that could make almost anything:
“But it's amazing to think about. What if you could take a cornfield or a nuclear reactor, and suddenly 30 minutes later you've got two of them, then four of them, and eight of them. That's quite an interesting concept.”
Weird world, right?
Don’t get us wrong. There’s no guarantee that any of this actually comes to be — at least not in our lifetimes. But it’s increasingly in the realm of possibility, and that alone is exciting to think about. Here’s something to leave you with:
“You have to be very cautious when you say something's impossible. It's safe to say it's impossible to do it this second, but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow in the next decade or something.”
If you’ve made it this far, please let me know if you have any feedback for me 🙂
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Thanks for covering such futuristic concept. The nanoboat concept is now like a mirage. I am reading about it since last 20 years. That time it was expected to be available in 2024, now we expect it at 2050. But still , for humanity betterment, is there proven scaled and visible development? Thanks