Good morning! Acronyms have great cache in the world of business. An acronym that mimics a word and is easy to roll off the tongue is a perfect branding and marketing tool in itself. The Sensex and Nifty, for instance. Catchy ticker symbols are hugely popular and for small, new exchange traded funds or companies trying to grab investor attention, snappy totems are great, says Financial Times. That’s why there are ETFs named SPY, YODA, MAGA, and NATO.

🎧 Indians may get a sweet deal from the trade pact with EFTA countries. Also in today’s edition: the latest updates in India's EV sector. Tune in to The Signal Daily on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Pushpita Dey, Soumya Gupta, and Adarsh Singh also contributed to today’s edition.

The Market Signal* 

Stocks & Economy: Many investors have priced in a US Federal Reserve rate cut and are awaiting consumer price inflation data for February, which will be published today, to affirm their thesis. Even Fed chief Jerome Powell has hinted that a cut is imminent. Yet, Wall Street statesman and JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon has advised the Fed against it. Dimon is not ruling out stagflation or even a recession of some sort. 

US shares ended Monday slightly lower and passed on the baton to Asia, where they were mixed in early Tuesday trade. Benchmark Indian indices finished lower on Monday than their previous close but morning movement in the GIFT Nifty indicates a positive opening. Traders are awaiting February retail inflation numbers, which will be published later today. 

Meanwhile, British American Tobacco, 29% owner of ITC, may sell some of it in blocks to raise up to $3 billion.

TELECOM

Spick And Spam

For the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), fighting spammers is like tilting at the windmills. The regulator has been trying for more than five years to stop this menace and yet has nothing much to show for it.

No solution: In 2018, Trai developed a blockchain-based technology called the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). Its goal was to bring consent-based calling and messaging to the masses, with telcos shouldering its implementation. Consequently, they started onboarding ‘clean’ businesses for enterprise messaging.

Despite initial success, DLT lapsed due to shoddy implementation. Jio in particular was the worst offender as it offered free registration, which inundated the system with spam. Trai has now called for a clean-up by deactivating inactive and irrelevant businesses. 

Take two: Trai’s other not-so-fancy tech solution includes a glitchy Do-Not-Disturb app and displaying Caller IDs but privacy concerns remain. Truecaller, which offers similar features, is a case in point. 

E-COMMERCE

Thriving In The Dark(store)

The business of selling online is converging on one goal: deliver quickly. Flipkart is re-entering quick commerce (it briefly ran a grocery delivery pilot in 2016). Meanwhile, BigBasket is offering two-hour delivery. To get things going, both firms are overhauling how they store and move goods, The Economic Times reports. 

Lean and limber: BigBasket has replaced delivery vans with two-wheelers, designed to deliver smaller orders faster and more frequently in a smaller service area. It has also removed loading docks for vans and made space for more goods—an average dark store carries 3x more stock keeping units, a measure of the number of products. 

That’s just step one.. As Zinal Dedhia wrote in this story for The Core, quick commerce firms run tightly-managed micro-warehouses with three shifts a day, hourly reports, and complex policies for replenishing stock. Bigger rivals will need to adapt to new ways of working.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Goodbye Science, Hello Commerce

Profit prerogatives and industry relationships nipping at academia’s heels aren’t a new thing. Big Pharma is infamous for it. But considering how regulation is struggling to keep up with whirlwind developments in AI, academics are worried about the shrinking avenues for independent research on the disruptive technology.

Gist: Big Tech having the resources for expensive AI infrastructure, while academia struggles for funds. Even the richest universities in the US can’t keep up. The Washington Post (WaPo) reports that Stanford, which pretty much incubated Silicon Valley, has 68 graphics processing units (GPUs) for research purposes. For context, Meta is planning a procurement of 350,000 GPUs.

The Signal

Resource skews affect objectivity. WaPo notes that AI academics, reeled in by Big Tech’s fat paychecks, industry-funded grants, and access to computing power and data they otherwise don’t have, are increasingly aligning research to product-driven goals.

An apt example in this context is OpenAI. Founded as an AI research organisation with a non-profit board, it ousted its for-profit-leaning CEO before investors baulked and forced an about turn. Now Sam Altman is back, reasserting control and seeking trillions of dollars to reshape the global chip industry.

In “aligning” their AI product and AI research divisions, Big Tech companies have also made clear where their priorities lie. The result is waning research freedom when we need objectivity most: well-funded, commercially-released AI tools are either hallucinating or flat out deceiving people. How far will things go once generative AI becomes the norm?

FINANCE

RBI In Hawk Mode

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is scrutinising co-branded credit cards to prevent surreptitious entries into the tightly-regulated credit card industry, The Economic Times (ET) reports. ET previously reported that as of January 12, Swiggy issued around 120,000 HDFC Bank cards, while Tata Neu issued around a million of them. ICICI Bank issued more than 4.7 million cards through Amazon Pay as of December 2023.

In a March 7 directive, RBI instructed co-branded card issuers to prominently display the name of the issuing bank. Additionally, it instructed co-branding partners not to access any transaction information of card-using customers. 

RBI has expressed concern over Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business norms, the latter in particular having fintechs in its crosshairs, as The Core reported. According to several banking consultants, violation of KYC norms could lead to data privacy breaches, which could explain RBI scrutiny.

INVESTING

Hedgies Would Rather Quit Than Reveal Investor info

Even as Indian stock markets create new records, a bunch of hedge funds are threatening to withdraw from India, Financial Times reports. 

They are miffed with market regulator Sebi, which has ordered foreign funds to disclose who their primary investors were. While the order was initially a blanket one, it exempted pension funds and later, funds that did business with large banks such as JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and UBS.

Hedgies, however, continue to be caught in the net. Sebi’s insistence on knowing the identity of end investors of foreign funds investing in India is a fallout of short seller Hindenburg Research’s report on the Adani Group alleging round tripping of funds into the company’s shares. 

About 20 years ago, Sebi had made a similar but unsuccessful attempt to unmask investors behind offshore derivative instruments called participatory notes extensively used by foreign investors. 

FYI

In force: India has notified rules under the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, which will allow easy citizenship to most migrants from neighbouring countries except Muslims. 

No lunch time: The Supreme Court denied State Bank of India’s appeal to deliver data on buyers of electoral bonds only by end-June. SBI must now furnish all details by this evening.

Go home: In an attempt to cut costs, edtech firm Byju’s has shut down all its offices across India except its headquarters and asked employees to work from home, The CapTable reported. 

💰: IndiGo co-founder Rakesh Gangwal sold 22.5 million shares in the company to raise $280 million, the largest equity block deal in India in five years. 

New order: Viacom18 has restructured its leadership, appointing Kiran Mani and Kevin Vaz as co-CEOs of the company gearing up to merge with Disney India.

More borrowing: President Joe Biden has unveiled a $7.3 trillion budget that will push up US debt to 102.2% of GDP by 2025. He has also proposed to raise taxes for big businesses and billionaires.

Holy weapon: India has successfully tested Agni-5, a 5,000-km-range missile capable of carrying multiple warheads, including nuclear, that can independently hit separate targets, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on X (formerly Twitter).

THE DAILY DIGIT

768 million

The total number of times Instagram was downloaded in 2023, overtaking rival TikTok, which was downloaded 733 million times (Financial Times) 

FWIW

This palace can’t Photoshop: If you’re on social media, you’re probably clued into the conspiracy theories around Kate Middleton’s “disappearance”. The Princess of Wales hasn’t been seen or photographed in two months. Speculation was rife, which was probably why Kensington Palace released a Mother’s Day photo of Kate and her three kids. That made matters worse. The official picture is riddled with so many bad Photoshop jobs that five photo agencies including Associated Press, Reuters, and AFP pulled it from their archives citing possible manipulation. Kate has since apologised for her “experiment with editing”, but tongues are still wagging.

Tintin in the Euros: The world’s most famous reporter-detective is back 38 years after Tintin and Alph-Art, his last cliffhanger of an adventure. But this time, he’s the subject of a tribute. Belgium has unveiled a new kit for its football team in the runup to the European Championships. That kit has a blue jersey with a white collar, brown shorts, and white socks—a hat tip to Tintin’s outfit. All that’s left is for them to don a distinctive quiff, much like their national hero.

Some Like It Not: In today’s edition of “nobody asked for this”, an AI firm has created a digital likeness of Marilyn Monroe. That likeness, dubbed ‘Digital Marilyn’, will make its (her?) debut at Austin’s South By Southwest tech conference. The firm, Soul Machines, has a partnership with brand management company Authentic Brands Group to create likenesses of deceased celebrities and will probably spring more such unpleasant surprises on us. As if this isn’t already material for a Saturday Night Live sketch, Digital Marilyn will don a black turtleneck a la Steve Jobs while still having her (its?) breathy voice and trademark blonde bob.