Daybreak

The Ken
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Daybreak

Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful. Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rahel Philipose, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.

  1. 39 MIN AGO

    How regional jewellery brands are trying to beat Tanishq at its own game

    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 Listen to the latest episode of Two by Two here 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.

    17 min

  2. 22 HR AGO

    Did someone just find the US$533 million that Byju’s lost?

    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. 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.

    11 min

  3. 2 DAYS AGO

    Why Mamaearth is stuck with dead stock and mounting losses

    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.

    13 min

  4. 3 DAYS AGO

    Are school-fee loans the next goldmine for Indian fintechs?

    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.  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.

    14 min
  5. The murky world of money mules and how they fuel India’s Rs 2,500 crore fraud economy

    5 DAYS AGO

    The murky world of money mules and how they fuel India’s Rs 2,500 crore fraud economy

    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. Subscribe here to listen to the full episode of Two by Two Listen to the free version of Two by Two here: AppleSpotify 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.

    29 min

  6. 6 DAYS AGO

    How lenders like Navi resort to extreme borrower surveillance to keep their A game on

    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. Subscribe here to listen to the full episode of Two by Two Listen to the free version of Two by Two here: AppleSpotifyDaybreak 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.

    18 min

  7. 19 NOV

    How do you get people to switch to electric cars? Take the subscription route

    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. 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.

    13 min

  8. 18 NOV

    As the Gen AI race heats up data centres, water becomes the new air

    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.

    13 min
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About

Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful. Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rahel Philipose, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.

Information

  • Channel
    The Ken
  • Creator
    The Ken
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2024
  • Episodes
    368
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © (c) 2023 The Ken
  • Show Website
    Daybreak
  • Provider

    Kenrise Media Private Limited has identified itself as a trader for this podcast and confirmed that this product or service complies with European Union law. Address No. 677, 1st Floor, 13th Cross HSR Layout, Sector 1 Bangalore 560102 Karnataka India Phone Number +91 9986701384 Email info@the-ken.com

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