Is Apple Losing Its Magic?
Our goal with The Daily Brief is to simplify the biggest stories in the Indian markets and help you understand what they mean. We won’t just tell you what happened, but why and how too. We do this show in both formats: video and audio. This piece curates the stories that we talk about.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and watch the videos on YouTube. You can also watch The Daily Brief in Hindi.
In today’s edition of The Daily Brief:
The Apple of my AI
The Tax-Free Exit That Wasn't
The Apple of my AI
Recently, Apple hosted the 2025 edition of its flagship developers’ conference, the WWDC. Like every year, developers and admirers of the Apple ecosystem waited with bated breath on the updates the generational company will reveal.
Sadly, it was underwhelming. Apple demonstrated a new re-design of its user interfaces, titled “Liquid Glass”. That’ll be part of the launch of iOS 26, which will also revamp apps like Camera, Phone and Music and FaceTime. The screening of calls and messages are more seamless. And there are new AI-generated emojis.
But there was a grand elephant that was missing in the room: in an era when its big tech rivals are casually talking about the “singularity”, there was little around what Apple’s AI strategy was. The word “Siri” — Apple’s voice assistant and the focal point of its AI ambitions for years — was uttered all of twice in the 90-minute stream.
Many reactions to the WWDC have been dismal. There are concerns that Apple is being steamrolled by its Big tech peers in the AI race. OpenAI, Google and Meta have all built their own generative AI models, while Apple has been stagnating.
But there are always differences between what’s happening, and what’s visible from the outside. What is really going on under the hood of one of the largest, most customer-obsessed companies in the world? How do we understand Apple’s intentions and executions in AI?
How Apple’s organisational design influences innovation
One perspective on these questions is to look at Apple’s ethos, and how it relates to (a) its organisational structure, (b) the direction of its innovation, and (c) the overlap between the two.
Perhaps uniquely among its ‘big tech’ peers, Apple prioritises consumer technology excellence. They channel all their functional expertise toward creating premium consumer devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. This is baked into its organisational structure, which ensures that every single team contributes to this singular focus on best-in-class consumer tech, all while upholding rigorous privacy standards.
Uniquely, Apple does not have divisions dedicated to each product. In 1997, Steve Jobs did away with product-based verticals and brought everything under a single P&L line. Behind this was the belief that a designer, for instance, should be able to make the final call on all things design, and having a single, multi-product “Design” vertical would achieve that. This allows designers to focus on each product, in a way that other organisations may not be able to. This ensures that Apple has a cohesive range of products, as opposed to a portfolio of separate, risky bets.
As a result, Apple’s innovation is mission-driven, and that mission is to advance the entire ecosystem of Apple products, making them inseparable. As a broad guideline, in service of that mission, it prefers to wait and watch how technologies mature before spinning its own magic. The iPhone, for instance, was not the first smartphone, neither was the iPod the first MP3 player. But they are the most successfully commercialised products in business history. Wharton management professor Paul Nary says:
“Apple’s competitors may argue and claim that they were the first to introduce this or that feature, or to invent it, but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple was often the one to commercialize it with the greatest degree of success.”
Due to this functional specialisation, only the CEO coordinates across divisions (Design, Marketing, Software, Hardware), unlike Google and Microsoft, which have multiple P&L lines and general managers overseeing cross-divisional projects.
This structure was a product of the single-minded vision of Steve Jobs. This kind of design has clear-cut advantages, but it also has a few risks. Specifically, there are two features in Apple’s organisational design which will play an important role in the story:
There may not be many links between functions, which allow them to interact with one another. They may operate as siloes, leading to disconnects — for instance, the Hardware and Communications/PR teams may not be on the same page.
Since these functions cannot interact with one another easily, it may be difficult to gain consensus on which products Apple should launch or close. The easiest way to side-step this problem would be to have the leadership decide missions unilaterally. But each leader will primarily represent the interests of their function, rather than the product itself.
There’s a strong possibility that we’re seeing something similar play out with AI.
How has Apple attempted to integrate AI into its organisation?
Let’s roll back the calendar a bit.
In 2011, Apple released Siri. It was the first of its kind — a voice assistant that you could ask to play music or set timers for you. Over time, it was meant to be developed into a second brain for the iPhone user. This idea — of a “second brain” that won’t just assist you but also interact with you intelligently is all too common now, with LLMs like ChatGPT. But Apple had that vision for AI and Siri far before generative AI entered the picture.
However, by 2018, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant had overtaken Siri’s performance, despite Siri having launched first. At least in part, this was because Apple didn’t have one AI team — it had AI units scattered all across its hardware and software functions. Apple’s machine learning workforce couldn’t massively influence the development of Siri under this arrangement.
To ensure they did not fall behind the curve, Apple hired Google’s chief of AI, John Giannandrea, also called “JG”. At the time, Apple had AI teams scattered across functions. But under JG’s leadership, these teams were all combined into one standalone AI vertical in Apple’s mission-driven org chart.
JG's entry sparked tensions over LLM investments and AI resource allocation across Apple's AI, software, and Siri teams. Software-head Craig Federighi was plainly sceptical of major AI investments, while Siri's senior director, Robby Walker, focused on making incremental improvements rather than reinventing it with AI at its core. Siri slowly began lagging behind its competitors in providing dynamic, contextual responses.
In fact, Apple’s AI/ML division was sarcastically titled “AI/MLess”, due to the constant indecision from their leadership on AI strategy. The development of Siri was often passed around to different teams with no coherent vision — despite Apple having employed some of the world’s smartest, most accomplished minds in the field.
And then, ChatGPT erupted onto the scene in 2022. Apple was blindsided. After observing the success of ChatGPT, Apple ditched a range of projects — like their secret self-driving car project — and shifted its resources to building Apple Intelligence.
Sadly, Apple’s internal GenAI models did not perform nearly as well as those of OpenAI, or even Google. But the engineers were still forbidden from using any component of competitors’ models into final products.
Siri inevitably became a focal point for Apple Intelligence. Although its leaders believed that generative AI could be quickly and successfully integrated with Siri, the approach actually led to frequent bugs. A rival like OpenAI never needed to face such issues, since it built chatGPT from the ground up. And while Google — which has let go of unprofitable products easily before — sacrificed its voice assistant in favour of building a GPT like Gemini, Apple could not do the same for Siri. Its organisational structure made it too hard to just shut a unit down, especially one that had been around for so long.
The lowest low for Apple came in last year’s WWDC. The show advertised a new version of Siri, powered by Apple Intelligence. However, developers watching the show realised, to their horror, that those features had never been built. For the first time in a long time, Apple was advertising something that it hadn’t actually brought to fruition. When the iPhone 16 was released a few months after that, consumers realised that Apple had over-promised but significantly under-delivered.
Since then, Siri’s leadership, as well as the structure of Apple’s AI/ML teams, have received a vast makeover. They’ve reverted back to being somewhat scattered across functions again. Meanwhile, JG is no longer involved in the Siri team.
The state of Apple’s AI ambitions today
Where is Apple Intelligence today?
It can perform many AI functions within the iPhone, like providing summaries of emails, improved search in the Photos App, or using GenAI to alter photos. But it still doesn’t have an LLM chatbot like Gemini. Additionally, as per its own evaluation, Apple's on-server model underperforms the larger models of OpenAI by metrics related to text and image understanding and reasoning.
Apple’s AI strategy is also negatively affecting the once-revered iPhone user experience. According to a survey by trade journal SellCell, 73% of Apple users feel these AI features add “little to no value” to their experience. That’s something it has in common with other smartphone manufacturers. The same survey depicts a deep reluctance on the part of users to pay for AI — not just for Apple, but for other handset providers like Samsung.
With things looking less-than-promising, Apple has to grapple with a fundamental question: is it necessary for it to build an LLM of its own to ride the AI wave?
While Samsung does not yet have its own LLM capabilities to rival incumbents, they enabled integration of their smartphones with ChatGPT and Gemini in 2024. Apple has started to follow suit. It allows chatGPT integration with the iPhone, and is considering letting Gemini be used as well. Earlier this year, it also chose Alibaba as its AI partner in the Chinese market, though that deal eventually fell apart.
Apple’s bigger AI bet, it seems, is on AR/VR technology. It believes that it is early on an exciting new technology, and it’s making active bets at the intersection of VR and GenAI. In fact, WWDC 2025 even announced a new AI-powered OS updated for Vision Pro. But the VisionPro’s sales figures tell a different story. Apple fell short of its initial expectations of selling close to 800,000 units in its first year. It had to revise those estimates to around 500,000 units and scaled back future production.
Despite this lackluster performance, Apple remains bullish on "GenAI x VR." It acquired 32 AI startups in 2023 — more than any peer. Many of those acquisitions are focused on Siri and Vision Pro, neither of which Apple wants to abandon.
But as far as the main AI arena goes, Apple is missing.
Apple’s inability to deliver on their earlier-made promises is hurting their stock. In fact, it has been the worst performing stock among the Magnificent 7 US tech firms in 2025.
Now, the recent stock performance of the Mag 7 has been massively influenced by the fervor around GenAI. But is that actually the right direction to go? Does Apple have to adapt to the dominant business models pursued by its competitors? Are those even good businesses? Is there a way out where Apple continues to stick to its roots in consumer hardware?
If there is a silver lining for Apple, it’s that other competitors do not have clear answers about their business models either.
No ROI in GenAI, yet
Investing in GenAI is a deeply expensive affair.
Earlier this year, Google announced a rollout of $75B on AI investments. Microsoft announced a corpus of $80B reserved for AI-enabled data centres. It has also staked at least $13B in OpenAI.
The problem, sadly, is that the profits haven’t shown up yet. Microsoft's GitHub CoPilot loses $20 per user monthly. Meanwhile, despite its impressive $4B revenue in 2024, OpenAI lost $5B over the year. And that will continue — its losses are estimated to reach $14B next year. According to journalist Ed Zitron, in fact, OpenAI spends $2.25 for every dollar it earns.
All these companies are funnelling massive sums into GenAI, without a definitive horizon on the potential returns. Jim Covello, the head of equity at Goldman Sachs explained his scepticism regarding AI’s large capex needs. If AI has hundreds of billions being poured into it, is there really a 100-billion dollar problem that it could solve?
We aren’t sure. While we’re extremely impressed with AI as a technology, it isn’t obvious that anyone who doesn’t make a generative AI play is somehow missing out.
If anything, Apple may have a key advantage over its Big Tech peers. It has one of the world’s most profitable and loyal consumer bases. It also has world-class hardware, far outpacing its big tech rivals. It has experience in commercialising consumer hardware, which will be invaluable in creating a long-term, monetizable use case for GenAI. The biggest example of this is Siri itself — formerly a government-funded technology company, it only became commercially viable as the voice of Apple products.
[Correction: Earlier in the piece, we compared Apple's on-device AI model to OpenAI's server model, which was misguided. Additionally, while the server GPT-4 does perform better than Apple's model on various metrics (such as image analysis and response generation), parameters are not the sole benchmark to compare AI model efficacy. This was a miss from us and we have corrected the same.]
The Tax-Free Exit That Wasn't
On June 2, 2025, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) released its first advance panel rulings under Section 10L of Singapore’s Income Tax Act — and for the first time since this law took effect in January 2024, we finally have a concrete answer to a question that Indian funds and start-ups have been hanging on for over a year.
These rulings are technical documents, filled with regulatory jargon about “human resources” and “premises requirements.” But strip away the bureaucratic language, and they tell a simple story: the era of shell companies routing India investments through Singapore is officially over.
Although these rulings come from Singaporean authorities, they’re very relevant to India’s business environment. Indian tax authorities could use them to determine whether a Singapore-based entity is merely a “conduit” when applying India's anti-abuse rules. Essentially, if Singapore doesn't think your entity is real enough to stay tax-free, India probably won't honour your treaty benefits either.
Not too long ago, Indian courts gave these structures a lot more leeway.
Consider the high-profile case of the American private-equity giant Blackstone. In July 2015, a Singapore-based investment vehicle owned by Blackstone sold its entire stake in Chennai-based Agile Electric to Japan’s Igarashi Electric. The deal netted it an enormous ₹4 billion in capital gains. The Indian tax authorities wanted to tax those gains, insisting that those gains were really made in India. The Singapore holding company, it claimed, was just a conduit set up to sidestep Indian capital-gains tax.
When the case reached the Delhi High Court in January 2023, though, the judges sided with Blackstone. After all, the entity sat in Singapore, and legally, that’s where the taxes would go.
At the moment, the case is stuck at the Supreme Court. But if the Delhi High Court had today’s Section 10L standards, things may have ended much earlier.
The new rulings provide Indian tax authorities with something they didn't have before — Singapore's own assessment of whether someone has a legitimate presence there. If Blackstone’s Singapore entity doesn’t meet the specific requirements that the new rulings spell out and IRAS concludes the same, India could point to those standards and say: "Even Singapore doesn't think this entity is legitimate enough to stay tax-free, so why should we give it that benefit?"
Singapore's Section 10L, in short, changes the very logic of how foreign investors can take their money out of India. Its new rulings have given both countries a clear playbook for what to tax, and what to avoid.
Singapore: India's favourite financial backdoor
To understand why this matters, you need to know just how central Singapore was to India's investment story.
For the past decade, Singapore has been India's largest source of foreign direct investment — not once, not twice, but for seven straight years. In FY 2024-25 alone, Singapore pumped in nearly $15 billion into our country, accounting for roughly 18% of India's record $81 billion total FDI.
Why Singapore? It wasn't just the two-hour flight time or the fact that everyone speaks English. It had the obvious advantages. Singapore offered a stable legal system, efficient regulation, and seamless USD banking — all crucial for global funds deploying into India. But the crown jewel was its tax treaty with India.
See, India and Singapore have a “Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement” (DTAA) — an agreement meant to ensure that both countries don’t end up independently taxing the same thing. In simple terms, it meant that until recently, if a Singaporean entity made capital gains from selling Indian shares, those gains would be taxed only in Singapore.
But there was a twist: Singapore didn't tax capital gains! Neither would India tax you, nor would Singapore. You got a beautiful zero-tax outcome. For a fund expecting to make a ₹100 crore return on exit, that was the difference between paying nothing and potentially losing ₹10-20 crore to Indian capital gains tax.
The appeal of this structure was obvious, and all sorts of funds caught on. Today, there are hundreds of India-focused PE and VC funds that have set up shop in Singapore, managing tens of billions in assets. This had become so routine that by the late 2010s, it was almost assumed that any serious India-focused investor would have a Singapore holding company.
Here’s how it all worked.
Tax treaties 101: Why they matter
Imagine you're a Singapore-based fund which sells shares in an Indian company for a huge profit.
Under normal circumstances, both countries might try to tax those gains. India might claim that the tax money really belongs to it, because the company from which all those gains arise is Indian. Singapore, on the other hand, might assert that because you're a Singapore resident, you owe it tax. That's a recipe for “double taxation”. If your luck is bad, both tax authorities might get after you.
Tax treaties exist to prevent exactly this problem. They're basically agreements between countries that say, "look, let’s divide up these taxing rights so the same income doesn't get hit twice."
Sometimes, these treaties give more rights to the investor's home country. At other times, they allow more source-country taxation. For years, the India-Singapore treaty followed the former approach for capital gains — India essentially gave up its right to tax share sales by Singapore residents, trusting that Singapore would tax them instead.
Only, Singapore historically didn't tax capital gains. Instead of merely avoiding double taxation, the result here was double non-taxation: zero tax in both countries.
A situation like this allows what critics call "treaty shopping" — where investors set up shell companies in some countries, not to do business there, but to merely route their investments. The entire purpose of these shell entities is to exploit favourable tax treaties. They don’t actually put any real money there, nor do those entities hire any actual decision-makers.
The evolution of India-Singapore tax relations
The India-Singapore tax story has gone through several iterations.
Back in 1994, the two countries had signed a fairly standard, no-frills treaty. But the game-changer came in 2005, when India agreed to give Singapore a capital gains exemption — much like Mauritius enjoyed.
There was a small catch: a “Limitation of Benefits” (LOB) clause. If companies wanted the benefit of this clause, they had to spend at least S$200,000 annually in Singapore, and its “primary purpose” couldn’t just be tax avoidance. But frankly, that S$200,000 was pocket change for most funds. Meanwhile, proving an investor’s "primary purpose" was incredibly tough for tax authorities. So the route flourished.
The first major crackdown came in 2016-2017. India realised that it was losing billions in tax revenue, and wanted to plug the leaks. After extensive negotiations, India and Singapore signed a protocol that fundamentally changed the game. Now:
The capital gains exemption ended for new investments. Any shares bought after March 31, 2017 would be taxable in India at normal rates.
But here's the crucial part: existing investments were "grandfathered." Shares bought before April 1, 2017, could still exit tax-free.
Between 2017 and 2019, they created a transition period. Anyone who invested over this time would have to pay low taxes on exit, but not zero tax.
This “grandfathering” was politically necessary — India couldn't retroactively change the rules without destroying investor confidence. But it created a massive overhang: tens of billions of dollars in investments that could still theoretically exit tax-free.
Was it really just tax dodging?
This Singapore route has always been controversial. Critics, including many in India's tax department, saw it as an elaborate tax avoidance scheme. Their argument was simple: many Singapore entities were nothing more than letterbox companies with no real function except claiming treaty benefits.
They had a point. These weren’t just investors sitting in Singapore. Fund structures are usually extremely complex, and are meant to rack up as many treaty benefits as possible. A typical one, for instance, might involve a Cayman shell entity, which sets up a vehicle in the Netherlands, which then sets up a Singapore holding company, which in turn holds Indian investments. That Singapore entity might have no employees, hold all its board meetings virtually, and make all its actual investment decisions from somewhere else entirely. It's hard to argue that this sort of thing represents genuine economic activity in Singapore.
But the fund industry pushes back hard on this characterisation. They argue that Singapore provides real value beyond tax benefits. The country is simply fund-friendly, with clear laws and strong investor protections. Singapore also operates seamlessly in US dollars — vital for global LPs — while India has strict currency controls that complicate offshore funding. All of this gives a Singapore base a real purpose.
More importantly, they contend that it’s foolish to look for a “business presence” for an investment vehicle. The venture capital model is inherently lean. A fund managing $500 million might legitimately operate with just 5-10 professionals globally. That doesn’t say anything about its legitimacy, only about the basic nature of the investment business. Comparing funds to traditional businesses with large local operations is, they argue, like comparing apples to oranges.
The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. Singapore is genuinely a great financial hub, and yet, the tax advantages were definitely part of what made the ecosystem thrive. Some entities had real substance; others were clearly shells.
Either way, in the last few years, the world has been souring on these arrangements.
The global crackdown: From BEPS to Section 10L
Singapore's Section 10L didn't emerge in isolation.
It's part of a global trend toward stricter anti-avoidance rules. There’s clearly a lot of international frustration around these structures, as is reflected, for instance, in the OECD's Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative. This clamour has been rising after the 2008 financial crisis, which made a lot of the world sceptical about all the legal cleverness that financial entities were up to. This created immense political pressure to crack down on tax avoidance by multinational corporations.
By 2017, the EU was blacklisting jurisdictions it considered tax havens. It demanded that others implement "economic substance" requirements, telling countries that if they wanted to offer tax advantages, they had to ensure some real economic activity to justify them.
Singapore was one of the countries in its scanner. As a sophisticated financial center, nobody would blacklist it outright, like some Caribbean islands were. But it was under pressure to show that entities benefiting from its relaxed tax regime had genuine substance.
The result was Section 10L, which was designed to keep the EU happy.
Inside Section 10L
So what exactly does Section 10L require?
The law essentially says that if you're a Singapore company that's part of an international group, and you make gains by selling foreign assets, those will be taxed at Singapore's standard 17% corporate tax rate.
Unless, that is, you can prove that your Singapore operations have "adequate economic substance." That is, you need to ensure the following:
People: You’ve hired enough people in Singapore, with actual qualifications.
Premises: You must have a physical office in Singapore. You don’t have to own property — you could be based out of a rented space, or even co-working space — but a mere registered address won't suffice.
Decision-making: You must make all your important strategic decisions — like the sorts that a board of directors makes — in Singapore. You can’t just rubber-stamp decisions that are made elsewhere.
Spending: You need to spend locally in Singapore, and spend enough that it makes sense for a business like yours. While there's no fixed limit for this, the old LOB requirement of S$200,000 annually is widely used as a benchmark.
Recently, Singapore's tax authority, ‘IRAS’, has issued what lawyers call “advance rulings” to provide even more clarity on these requirements.
As per these rulings, even if you have a pure holding company with one Singaporean employee that manages investments, that’s an "excluded entity" — that is, its gains remain tax-free.
But there’s a flip side. If you just have nominee directors in Singapore, while all the real decisions are made abroad, or if you lack any actual local operations, you fail the test. You have to face Singapore's 17% corporate tax on foreign gains.
India's Response: GAAR and the PPT
India hasn't been a passive observer in this drama. We have our own arsenal of anti-avoidance weapons. Section 10L just gives India additional ammunition:
GAAR (General Anti-Avoidance Rule): That’s our domestic “anti-avoidance” law. This basically lets tax authorities ignore any structure that is primarily meant for tax avoidance, without actual commercial substance. Crucially, the India-Singapore treaty explicitly states that GAAR can override treaty benefits.
PPT (Principal Purpose Test): The India-Singapore treaty also has a ‘PPT clause’. Essentially, India can deny treaty benefits to a company, if obtaining those benefits was one of the principal purposes of how it was structured.
Here's where Section 10L fits in with this arsenal: if Singapore itself thinks that an entity lacks “substance” — by taxing its gains under Section 10L — India can argue that this is strong evidence the entity was meant for avoiding tax. It's like getting external validation for your allegations.
That said, this could work both ways. If a Singapore entity gets an IRAS ruling confirming it has adequate substance, it can point to that ruling before Indian courts as well, using it as proof that Singapore considers it legitimate.
What's Really at Stake
The financial implications are staggering. Based on DPIIT data — the five years before 2017 saw roughly $35 billion worth of Indian investments. These were all “grandfathered” under the old treaty rules; that is, whenever investors cash out, they’re protected by the old, pre-2017 rules.
But now, those are in a limbo. If Singapore considers those entities legitimate, neither country taxes them. But if it doesn’t, both countries might now tax them.
It’s not as if investors will make good returns on all of these. But even a conservative assumption suggests tens of billions in potential capital gains that investors expected to realize tax-free. Consider the math: If $20 billion in gains eventually emerge from grandfathered investments, and tax authorities successfully challenge even a quarter of those cases, that's $5 billion that tax authorities will suddenly have a right over. We're talking about $1-2 billion in additional tax revenue.
Equally importantly, for Singapore, the rule helps protect its reputation as a legitimate financial centre rather than a mere tax haven.
The Bottom Line
For two decades, the India-Singapore corridor allowed investors to have their cake and eat it too — accessing India's growth story while largely avoiding its tax system. That arbitrage is closing.
But this isn't necessarily bad news for either country. Singapore gets to cement its reputation as a legitimate financial hub anchored by real economic activity. India gets more tax revenue and reduces concerns about base erosion. As India builds out alternatives like GIFT City and continues improving its own regulatory environment, the need for offshore intermediaries may eventually diminish.
For investors, though, it’s a mixed bag. They at least get more clarity and predictability, even if it comes with higher costs. But, in all, successful cross-border investing now requires genuine substance, not just clever structuring.
Tidbits
Palm Oil Demand Rebounds as India and China Step Up Imports Amid Price Correction
Source: Reuters
Palm oil prices, after rising nearly 20% last year, have corrected around 12% so far, prompting a demand revival from top consumers India and China. Malaysia’s benchmark palm oil closed at 3,864 ringgit per ton on Tuesday, with expectations that prices will hover between 3,900 and 4,200 ringgit per ton over the next six months. India, which had reduced palm oil imports since December due to high prices, is now increasing purchases for June to August shipments. Similarly, China is stepping up imports as domestic stock levels remain low. This renewed buying interest could support export volumes from Malaysia and Indonesia during the upcoming peak season. Analysts note that palm oil’s regained price advantage over rival oils is driving the current trend. The sustainability of this recovery, however, will depend on whether palm oil can maintain its pricing edge.
Maruti Suzuki Slashes H1 EV Production by Two-Thirds Amid Rare Earth Supply Constraints
Source: Business Line
Maruti Suzuki has reduced its electric vehicle production plan for April to September FY26 from 26,512 units to 8,221 units — a sharp two-thirds cut — due to rare earth material shortages, according to a company document. Despite the setback, the carmaker maintains its full-year target of producing 67,000 units of the e-Vitara by ramping up output in the second half to 58,728 units. The e-Vitara, launched in January 2025, marks Maruti’s entry into India’s EV segment. The production cut comes even as the company claimed earlier there was “no material impact” on the launch timeline. Maruti’s parent Suzuki plans to export a large portion of these units to key markets like Europe and Japan. The company’s market share has declined to 41% from a peak of 51% in March 2020. Additionally, Suzuki has revised its India vehicle sales target for FY31 to 2.5 million from the earlier 3 million and scaled back its EV launch plans from six models to four.
India’s Oil PSUs Plan $600 Million Tender for 10 Homebuilt Tankers
Source: Bloomberg
Indian state-run refiners—Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum, and Hindustan Petroleum—are set to issue a joint tender for 10 domestically-built medium-range tankers by the end of this year, with expected delivery starting in 2028. The proposed fleet, ranging between 50,000 to 60,000 deadweight tons each, is valued at up to $600 million in total, with individual ship costs estimated between $55–60 million. Indian Oil is likely to own six of these vessels, while BPCL and HPCL may own two each. While the initiative aligns with India’s shipbuilding expansion agenda, it may involve higher costs compared to foreign-built ships. Currently, only four of India’s 40 shipyards can build tankers of this size. Around 13% of the country's petroleum products are transported through coastal routes, with over half moving via pipelines. The refiners are reportedly seeking financial support, as they consider chartering a more economical option.
- This edition of the newsletter was written by Pranav and Apoorv.
📚Join our book club
We've started a book club where we meet each week in JP Nagar, Bangalore to read and talk about books we find fascinating.
If you think you’d be serious about this and would like to join us, we'd love to have you along! Join in here.
🧑🏻💻Have you checked out The Chatter?
Every week we listen to the big Indian earnings calls—Reliance, HDFC Bank, even the smaller logistics firms—and copy the full transcripts. Then we bin the fluff and keep only the sentences that could move a share price: a surprise price hike, a cut-back on factory spending, a warning about weak monsoon sales, a hint from management on RBI liquidity. We add a quick, one-line explainer and a timestamp so you can trace the quote back to the call. The whole thing lands in your inbox as one sharp page of facts you can read in three minutes—no 40-page decks, no jargon, just the hard stuff that matters for your trades and your macro view.
Go check out The Chatter here.
“What the hell is happening?”
We've been thinking a lot about how to make sense of a world that feels increasingly unhinged - where everything seems to be happening at once and our usual frameworks for understanding reality feel completely inadequate. This week, we dove deep into three massive shifts reshaping our world, using what historian Adam Tooze calls "polycrisis" thinking to connect the dots.
Frames for a Fractured Reality - We're struggling to understand the present not from ignorance, but from poverty of frames - the mental shortcuts we use to make sense of chaos. Historian Adam Tooze's "polycrisis" concept captures our moment of multiple interlocking crises better than traditional analytical frameworks.
The Hidden Financial System - A $113 trillion FX swap market operates off-balance-sheet, creating systemic risks regulators barely understand. Currency hedging by global insurers has fundamentally changed how financial crises spread worldwide.
AI and Human Identity - We're facing humanity's most profound identity crisis as AI matches our cognitive abilities. Using "disruption by default" as a frame, we assume AI reshapes everything rather than living in denial about job displacement that's already happening.
Subscribe to Aftermarket Report, a newsletter where we do a quick daily wrap-up of what happened in the markets—both in India and globally.
Thank you for reading. Do share this with your friends and make them as smart as you are 😉
Even a small mention of Ed Zitron makes me extremely happy!!