Airport lounges once felt like unaffordable luxuries. They're still that for most of India. But if you're one of the lucky few that regularly take flights and own a credit card, you've probably found yourself stepping into these swanky spaces a lot more lately.🧵👇 For that, you should thank a company called DreamFolks. They created the infrastructure that made airport lounges so commoditized and popular. It plays broker between banks wanting to acquire customers, and folks like you and me that dream of 5-star comfort before a flight.

We came across this report from Motilal about the plastics and pipes industry, and since we have never really covered this industry, we thought now would be a good time to look at it. India's pipes industry is quietly reshaping infrastructure everywhere.🧵👇 Like many sectors in India, it's moving from an unorganised, hyper-local setup to one that's more brand-led, formal, and quality-driven. It's changing how homes are built, water reaches your tap, farms get irrigated, and cities lay sewage systems.

The Reserve Bank of India just released its monthly bulletin with a fascinating research paper buried inside: "Drivers of CD Issuances: An Empirical Assessment." The findings reveal how banks are scrambling for money in ways we haven't seen before.🧵👇 Here's what the researchers found: "higher credit growth along with tight system liquidity encourages CD issuances, while increase in market volatility decreases CD issuances." But what does this actually mean for India's banking system?

There's an institution most people know nothing about, but it releases a report every year which the financial world treats as scripture. The Bank for International Settlements — the "central bank of central banks" — just revealed their vision for the future of money.🧵👇 When the BIS speaks, everyone from central bankers to finance ministers take note. They connect monetary theory to financial plumbing, laying out how monetary systems should work. Their latest chapter has a sweeping vision for next-generation money: tokenisation.

Most of us picture garbage trucks when we think of waste management. But that's just the closest end of a seven-step process: generation, segregation, collection, transportation, processing, disposal, and monitoring.

The sector is worth $7.85 billion, growing at 5% annually.🧵👇 India generates over 170,000 tonnes of municipal solid waste daily. It's not that we're wasteful individually - Americans throw away 2.2 kg per person daily while the average Indian generates only 123.45 grams. But with 1.4 billion people, small amounts create mountains.

The RBI just made a quiet but massive change that could move ₹41,000 crore in banking capital. Small Finance Banks now need to lend just 60% to priority sectors instead of 75%. Here's why this matters more than it sounds.🧵👇 The RBI has been busy tweaking priority sector lending rules. First came a huge package in March 2025 expanding PSL scope. Then June 2025 brought microfinance loan changes. Now SFBs get their turn with this major relaxation.

For years, Sanjiv Bhasin had a stock call for every investor. Whether you were a 25-year-old watching Zee Business or a retiree on ET Now, you saw him pitching picks with bold targets and confident reasoning. To many retail investors, he was a rare trusted voice in complex markets.🧵👇 And that, according to SEBI's recent 149-page interim order, is what let him get away with fraud. To SEBI, this is a case of monetised trust, weaponised mass media, and an architecture built around extracting profits from public beliefs through sophisticated market manipulation.

Yesterday we explored how ports are "the lungs of our economy" - 90% of goods by volume touch our ports. But knowing ports matter is one thing. Understanding the actual businesses that run them is quite another. Let's dive into Adani Ports and JSW Infrastructure at an interesting juncture.🧵👇 Some of our biggest port players aren't just running ports anymore. They're building something much more ambitious. Adani Ports runs 15 ports and terminals across India, capturing 27% share of all cargo handled. Its flagship Mundra port just became the first in India to cross 200 MMT annually.

You might have seen scary graphs about India's FDI figures lately. While there's nuance to reading such graphs, there's basic truth to the fact that we're getting less foreign investment than we'd like. That should worry us - FDI acts as a fast-forward button for development. 🧵👇 When people from other countries build factories, offices, or research centers in India, they don't just bring money - they bring technology, expertise, and relationships that play a foundational role in accelerating economic growth. But sadly, FDI is harder to attract than ever.

There's something brutal about the tyre business. Your two biggest cost inputs - natural rubber and crude oil derivatives - can swing 30% in months.

You're playing second fiddle in an industry where car manufacturers call the shots. Yet you must make decade-long bets on factories and technology.🧵👇 This fundamental tension defines India's ₹90,000+ crore tyre industry. Companies must navigate quarterly commodity price shocks while making massive strategic choices about Indian mobility's future.

Do you bet big on EV tyres when EVs are under 2% of sales? The timing challenge is brutal.

Apple's recent WWDC was underwhelming. The company demonstrated new "Liquid Glass" UI redesign for iOS 26, revamped apps, and AI-generated emojis. But there was a grand elephant missing: while rivals casually discuss "singularity," Apple's AI strategy remains unclear.🧵👇 The word "Siri" - Apple's voice assistant and focal point of AI ambitions for years - was uttered just twice in the 90-minute stream. Many reactions have been dismal, with concerns that Apple is being steamrolled by big tech peers in the AI race.

The world of gold loans in India is set for a significant makeover. RBI just unveiled comprehensive "Lending Against Gold and Silver Collateral Directions, 2025" - a new rulebook all banks, NBFCs, and cooperative banks must follow by April 1, 2026. This affects millions nationwide.🧵👇 These rules create standards around how banks and NBFCs lend against precious metals as collateral. They protect borrowers from unfair practices RBI highlighted last September - from outsourcing important checks to making overly large cash disbursements. We finally have regulatory answers.

India's oil refining landscape is a tale of two worlds. State-owned giants (IOC, BPCL, HPCL) focus on domestic fuel appetite. Private refiners like Reliance and Nayara had to look elsewhere - but now they're making a historic pivot back home.

Here's why this matters.🧵👇 Private refiners built completely different strategies in the shadow of state-owned refineries. If state refiners cornered domestic markets, they would look outside. They constructed world-class, complex refineries designed to process crude and ship refined products globally.

A €3.8 million Paris apartment belonging to India's Deputy Chief of Mission was seized by French courts in 2022.

The reason? A decade-old satellite deal gone spectacularly wrong. This is just the beginning of a global hunt for Indian assets.🧵👇 Last week, the Indian government got another piece of horrible news. All 9 US Supreme Court justices unanimously struck down a key legal defence that Antrix (ISRO's arm) was using to avoid a $1.29 billion award. Indian assets in America - PSU bank accounts, diplomat homes - are now fair game for seizure.

The RBI just pulled off the most contradictory monetary policy move in years: delivered aggressive easing (50 basis point rate cut + 100 basis point Cash Reserve Ratio cut) but immediately shifted to neutral stance. Markets got the stimulus they wanted, but lost future rate cut expectations.🧵👇 Here's what caught everyone off guard: Repo rate slashed by 50 basis points to 5.5% when analysts expected just 25bp. This is the most dovish the RBI has been in years, signalling serious intent to boost growth.

The RBI released its 2024-25 annual report and everyone's covering the headlines - household savings up, surplus transfers at record highs. But buried within are research nuggets that reveal how India's economy is quietly transforming.

Here are the insights you missed.🧵👇 The Innovation Gap: India spends just 0.7% of GDP on R&D. Israel leads globally at 6%, South Korea 5%, US 3.4%. Most developed countries spend over 2%. We're making progress - R&D spending doubled from Rs 60,197 crore to Rs 1,27,381 crore in a decade, but there's a structural issue.

The hotel business is deeply vulnerable to volatility. Hoteliers run massive properties with huge fixed costs, while demand is driven by things they can't control - travel patterns, economy, and regulation. Through all this short-term noise, they must make long-term bets. 🧵👇 We looked at three major players: IHCL (the behemoth straddling every segment), Chalet Hotels (urban premium focus with rental income), and Lemon Tree (mid-market specialist with asset-light growth). Each offers a different lens on the same industry.

Something remarkable happened in India on May 26. Electricity prices on the power exchange crashed to almost zero. Not cheap - practically free. For several hours between 9 AM and 1 PM, power was trading at just 11 paise per kilowatt-hour.🧵👇 Generators were basically giving away electricity. The price hit rock bottom - less than the exchange's own transaction fee. The culprit? India's solar power boom.

We dug through 19 earnings calls across 11 industries to find the sharpest insights for this edition of "The Chatter."

Here’s a sneak peek at 7 standout comments from India's top companies 🧵 Ola Electric on regulatory issues about mismatch in sales data and RTO registrations is resolved

Today, we're diving into one of pharma's most interesting verticals:

Contract Development and Manufacturing Organisations (CDMOs). These are the back-end engines of the pharmaceutical world—they don't invent drugs or sell under their own names, but develop and manufacture for global clients.🧵👇 Think of CDMOs as white-label manufacturers dealing with layers of scientific and regulatory complexity. They make everything from APIs to finished formulations to complex injectables. For global pharma, outsourcing lets them focus on high-value R&D and commercialisation without capital risks.

Pharmaceuticals is one of the most complex, globally-entangled industries we've encountered. It's where science meets law, pricing power meets public health, and decades of investment can collapse or explode with a single regulatory call.

India sits at the heart of it all.🧵👇 Pharmaceuticals split into two camps: small molecules (standard chemical drugs like paracetamol made through chemical reactions) and large molecules or biologics (insulin, antibodies, vaccines made using living cells). India's global edge was built on small molecules, but we're learning biologics too.