Today, ~80% of India's organised tea estates fell into cash losses, and premium Assam teas have crashed 27%. But one question looms large—how is a country that swears by chai hurting so badly in tea production?

Let's find out. 🧵👇 Hemant Bangur, chairman of the Indian Tea Association, warned that "only a handful of estates will achieve positive EBITDA, thus eroding the industry's financial foundations further." Tea prices have crashed from ₹304/kg to ₹221/kg. The ITA is calling for a minimum support price.

India's "growth story" has echoed in boardrooms for decades. But an economic slowdown in recent years has sparked worrying commentary. One thing caught our attention—private capex, the engine of long-term growth, is failing us.

Let's find out why. 🧵👇 When businesses build new factories, set up plants, or invest in new technology, they create jobs, boost demand for raw materials, and set up future production capacity. Government spending helps, but private companies make growth broad-based and self-sustaining.

What does it take to build a global financial hub from scratch?
India’s been trying to do exactly that with GIFT City, its answer to Singapore and Dubai.

But building a financial hub is one of the hardest things to get right. Let’s see why.🧵👇 India just launched a Foreign Currency Settlement System at GIFT City, allowing dollar transactions without routing through overseas banks. But here's what's fascinating, in 2015, Gujarat's finance minister claimed GIFT would be among world's top 5 financial centers.

Microfinance in India has this pattern, it runs too hot, then too cold. After the pandemic, lenders went on a spree as money was cheap and demand was high. But maybe too cheap, borrowers took 5-6 loans from different lenders all at once.🧵👇 By late 2023, repayment troubles started bubbling up. What followed was a familiar downcycle. By early 2024, stress was everywhere. Micro-loan growth, which had been roaring, suddenly hit the brakes.

Your morning coffee, your smartphone, even the steel in your car, they all traveled by ship. 90% of everything we touch moves by sea, yet nobody talks about who builds these ships. China quietly captured 53% of this market, and India just bet ₹69,725 crore to catch up 🧵👇 Ships are the unsung plumbers of global commerce. Without them, iron ore doesn't reach steel mills, oil doesn't reach refineries, and your electronics don't reach your doorstep. China now builds 53% of the world's ships, rising from third to first place in just a decade.

After a decade of playing cat-and-mouse with Amazon, India just blinked. A new draft proposal could let e-commerce platforms directly buy from Indian sellers and export them, something currently prohibited. This is the first major liberalization in years, and it's stirring both hope and outrage.🧵👇 India has always been suspicious of foreign-owned e-commerce platforms. We prohibited them from holding inventory or selling directly to consumers, either at home or abroad. They had to operate as mere marketplaces, strictly middlemen connecting independent sellers to buyers.

We sat down with @ishmohit1 (@soicfinance) to decode the $45B GLP-1 revolution, why people on these drugs hate food, how Novo bought a bottleneck, and what India should watch.

This thread unpacks everything, from the physiology to the supply chain to the investment plays 🧵 GLP-1 drugs mimic a natural hormone that makes you feel full and supports insulin release, you eat less, see better glucose control.

"There's a magic pill vibe, but that's an oversimplification." Benefits cascade, weight loss, improved cholesterol, kidney endpoints.

Jindal Steel just made a non-binding offer to buy the steel business of Germany-based Thyssenkrupp, one of the largest European steel businesses. This isn't a signed deal yet, but Jindal is ready to splash billions of euros on one of Europe's oldest steel names.🧵👇 Thyssenkrupp operates the largest steel plant in Europe at Duisburg, but it's also one of the dirtiest by emissions, still running on old coal-fired blast furnaces. To keep selling steel in Europe with its strict climate rules, Duisburg must be rebuilt at enormous cost.

The Indian Supreme Court just delivered a sweeping 50-page verdict that could fundamentally reshape India's residential real estate industry. What started as a simple bankruptcy dispute became a blueprint for cleaning up one of India's most troubled sectors.🧵👇 It began with speculative investors trying to use India's bankruptcy system to recover money from failed real estate projects. The court threw out their cases, but then did something remarkable, declaring housing a fundamental right for all Indians.

Today, the world seems to be at the cusp of a trade war. The US and China have imposed hundreds of billions in tariffs on each other, export controls on semiconductors are proliferating, and countries from India to Brazil are raising trade barriers.🧵👇 But it wasn't long ago when the world was marked by far more integration. The flow of goods, services, and ideas across borders has been a key story in economic growth and poverty reduction. What does the past tell us about where global trade is headed?

Industrial gases are the backbone of all industrial production. We never looked at this industry before, frankly, we didn't realize how important it is. But once you know where to look, you'll see it everywhere.🧵👇 Hospitals, steel plants, refineries, food packaging, even semiconductors, all of them run on a constant supply of gases. It's one of those hidden systems of the economy, quiet, technical, and taken for granted.

While semiconductors grab headlines, there's another piece of the electronics puzzle that's quietly reshaping global tech, Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs). From your smartphone to EV batteries, every device has at least one PCB inside.🧵👇 Here's the reality, a chip, no matter how powerful, is fundamentally useless without a PCB. To function, chips must be mounted on circuit boards that connect them to power sources, other chips, and input/output interfaces.

Somewhere between the jargon and the disclaimers, CEOs accidentally said some real things this week.

We dig through concalls & interviews every week for our newsletter - The Chatter.

Here are the 8 insightful quotes from this week’s edition 👇 Dr Reddy’s CEO on how the biz of GLP-1 is a marathon, not a sprint

In India, millions chase thousands of seats in elite institutions like IITs, IIMs, AIIMS. This brutal competition created the perfect opportunity for PhysicsWallah, from scrappy YouTube channel to ₹3,820 crore IPO filing. Here's how they built an edtech empire 🧵👇 India's ₹15 lakh crore education market breaks down into clear segments. K-12 dominates with over half the market, serving 37 crore school children. Higher education handles formal degrees, while test prep operates as a parallel industry unlocking competitive exam success.

Most people obsess over the stock market—which makes sense, since it directly affects their portfolios. But the bond market often tells us just as much, if not more, about the economy. The problem is that not a lot of people pay attention to it.🧵👇 So we decided to take a closer look. And honestly, it looked strange at first glance. Since the start of the year, the RBI has been slashing repo rates aggressively, front-loading cuts to jumpstart growth. In theory, this makes borrowing cheaper across the economy.

Imagine building a new house. You think cement and steel, but what about plumbing, wires, paint, tiles, woodwork, sanitaryware? That simple cement exercise pulls in a whole bunch of industries, collectively known as "building materials."🧵👇 A house isn't just walls and a roof. To actually live in it, you'll need water and electricity. That means plumbing, wires, cables. Then comes the part where you want it to look good. So you paint it, do waterproofing, lay tiles.

While headlines focus on farmer distress and export restrictions, the latest RBI bulletin reveals a quieter transformation across India's farmlands, a story about how Indian agriculture has grown over the past three decades that matters for nearly half a billion people.🧵👇 Agriculture remains central to India's economy in ways GDP numbers don't capture. While farming contributes less than one-fifth of GDP, it still employs 46.1% of India's workforce, that's almost half the population affecting food security for 1.4 billion Indians.

Picture the world in 2050, just 25 years from now. Will factories in Bangladesh produce goods as efficiently as those in Japan? Will India's economy finally rival that of the United States? These aren't just abstract questions, they're about the economic futures of billions.🧵👇 For decades, economists held what seemed like ironclad logic, poor countries should grow faster than rich ones. If you're starting from almost nothing, you have enormous room to grow, right? You can copy technologies, learn from mistakes, and leapfrog entire stages of development.

Something fascinating is happening in Andhra Pradesh. Companies across sectors, from clean energy to electronics to oil, keep announcing massive projects there. We noticed this pattern in conference calls and interviews, and we're not alone.🧵👇 SOIC founder Ishmohit spotted the same trend. Why is a single Indian state getting this much attention? What's driving this investment rush? The answer lies in a story that began 11 years ago with a painful division.

There's a fundamental question about our fate as an economy that we all keep coming back to, how did China, a country as complex as ours, beginning from roughly the same point in the 1980s, leave us so far behind?🧵👇 Many different answers have been offered, ranging from our political systems, to our respective cultures, to when and how our two countries liberalised their laws. And all of them get to some of the truth.

The Reserve Bank of India makes decisions that impact 140+ crore people in almost every aspect of their financial lives. So how do we know if the RBI is doing a good job? Turns out, the RBI has something resembling a report card.🧵👇 Back in 2016, Parliament amended the RBI Act to give it a crystal clear mandate, keep prices stable while supporting growth. This was to be measured by how well it stuck to a target, keeping consumer price inflation at 4%, with a tolerance band of 2%.