China Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mumbai: When Dilip Shanghvi walked into the press conference to announce Sun Pharmaceutical’s acquisition of Organon & Co.—an $11.75 billion deal that will effectively double the company’s revenue to $12.4 billion—he offered a rare admission.“I’m happy, excited, also a little bit anxious,” he told journalists, adding that the sheer size of the transaction reminded him of announcing the Ranbaxy Laboratories deal a decade ago.Back then, Sun was a fraction of its current size. This time, it is acquiring a company roughly equal in size, paying for it with cash and borrowed money rather than stock, and doing so at what Shanghvi described as “less than 25% of Sun’s own value.”At the surface, the Organon deal is a story about scale—a large Indian generics company buying an even larger portfolio of established branded drugs and biosimilars from a spun-off Merck subsidiary.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Recently, I attended a lecture on ‘Long-term missions in a short-term world’ by S. Gurumurthy. To me, the biggest example has been China.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.China escalated its fight against the U.S. over Iranian oil, defying American sanctions in a show of resistance ahead of President Trump’s visit to Beijing planned for next week.Beijing has typically been wary of being seen to openly violate U.S. sanctions, even as privately run Chinese refiners, known as “teapots,” buy nearly every barrel of oil Iran exports.But China’s Commerce Ministry on Saturday told companies not to comply with the U.S.’s blacklisting of several Chinese refineries over alleged purchases of Iranian oil, invoking for the first time a 2021 “blocking rule” designed to counteract foreign laws it believes violate international norms or restrict trade.“It sends a broader message that China is willing and can resist what it views as unilateral and unfair sanctions that hurt Chinese interests,” said Dylan Loh, a professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University who studies China’s foreign policy.The U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Power Grid Corp. of India Ltd, the top power transmission utility, sits at the heart of India’s electricity network, moving bulk power across states and linking generation with distribution.Its business runs on long-term, 35-year transmission contracts under a regulated tariff framework set by the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), should India create its own large language models (LLMs) that can work on a trillion-plus parameters? Scale-wise, this would put them in contention with LLMs created by US players OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and their Chinese rivals Alibaba, DeepSeek and Moonshot, with ByteDance, Tencent and Zhipu AI not far behind. Or should India focus on creating AI tools and agents based on available models? Eminent leaders of India’s success in IT services have argued in favour of the latter option. Scarce resources need not go into building frontier models from scratch, they say, as we could gain more by using what already exists to go further.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.New Delhi: Poriborton (meaning change in Bengali) was the big call across West Bengal, and poriborton it was when the final results emerged on Monday.The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is set to register a watershed win in the 294-member assembly to unseat the ruling Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) and end a 15-year rule.As of 5.30 pm, BJP had a vote share of 45.4% and had won or was leading in 202 of the 293 seats for which results are available. It was largely a binary contest, and the other parties, like the Indian National Congress (INC) and Communist parties, barely registered a presence in seats.In the 2021 assembly polls, the BJP had emerged as the leading opposition party with 77 seats and around 38% vote share, up from a mere three seats and 10% vote share in 2016.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Crude oil, the undistilled kind right out of the ground, was known to the Mesopotamians, Persians and Babylonians. The Chinese were the first to dig shallow wells and transport flammable oil through bamboo pipelines. Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner was the pioneer who began to distil oil and coined the term ‘kerosene’ in the mid-1850s.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Any doubts that China has become the heartland of the global car industry are quickly dispelled by a visit to the country’s main motor show. Beijing’s noisy and crowded event this year was twice as large as in 2024 (it moves to Shanghai on alternate years) with around 180 new cars on display. The show, which concluded on May 3rd, demonstrated once again that foreign carmakers are lagging behind their Chinese rivals in the race to the industry’s future.Yet the show also illustrated the extent to which foreign carmakers are looking to remake themselves in the image of their ascendant Chinese competitors.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.AMERICA’S TOP artificial-intelligence labs have accused their Chinese rivals of being ruthless copycats. This month Anthropic and OpenAI each disclosed evidence that leading Chinese AI labs have illicitly used American models to train their own. The firms accuse Chinese researchers of aggressively “distilling” American chatbots—feeding them prompts in order to learn from and mimic their responses.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.TOKYO—One of the major surprises about the gravest energy shock since the 1970s is how resilient much of the world has been so far.The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has yanked around 13 million barrels of oil a day from global energy supplies. Blackouts have hit Pakistan, the Philippines has imposed a four-day workweek, and countries including Slovenia and Bangladesh have rationed fuel.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.At the FIDE Women’s Candidates Tournament 2026, which took place in Cyprus from March 28 to April 15, eight of the sharpest minds in chess matched wits and will over 14 rounds in 19 days, hoping to survive and eventually surpass the field. For Indian star Vaishali Rameshbabu, it was a defeat deep in the tournament that brought some respite.Having started the Candidates with four draws and a loss, Vaishali, the lowest rated player in the field, found herself one full point ahead of the rest after beating Aleksandra Goryachkina in round 11.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The Iran war has offered China, Russia and North Korea—the U.S.’s biggest security threats—a rare opportunity to learn about the capabilities and limitations of the U.S. military.The three powers have witnessed certain new American weapons in combat for the first time, including lightning-fast precision airstrikes assisted by artificial intelligence.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.From India and New Zealand formally signing a free trade agreement (FTA) to India once again becoming a net exporter of finished steel, the index of industrial production (IIP) easing to a five-month low in March, freshers facing disruptions in job offers,and gender disparity in India’s boardrooms — here is a compilation of this week's news in numbers.India and New Zealand formally signed a comprehensive free trade agreement (FTA) on Monday after completing the negotiations in just nine months in December 2025, making this one of the fastest trade deals ever concluded. The deal carries a $20 billion investment commitment from Wellington over the next 15 years, commerce minister Piyush Goyal said.The FTA will grant duty-free access to all Indian exports to New Zealand, spanning 100% of tariff lines.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Most companies are built to survive a generation. A few endure longer.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For almost five decades, Iran’s Islamic government has survived financial pressure from the U.S. by selling oil to China. It confronted American military might with guerrilla tactics.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.THE BINHAI library, often called China’s most beautiful, is breathtaking. Swirling shelves of books rise in gravity-defying stacks to a high ceiling in a light-dappled room: a modern cathedral to learning. No wonder the library, in Tianjin, an eastern city, has become a favourite photo stop for glammed-up young folk posting to social media.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.It has been almost two decades since the late Shinzo Abe [former prime minister of Japan] stood in India’s parliament and told the assembled legislators that “it is incumbent upon us two democracies, Japan and India, to carry out the pursuit of freedom and prosperity in the region.” Abe defined their task as protecting freedom of navigation in what he was perhaps the first to call the Indo-Pacific. That task has gotten only more urgent as America withdraws—or, more recently, imposes blockades on crucial straits—and China pushes harder against the first island chain.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Two major films – Salman Khan’s Maatrubhumi and Vijay’s Jana Nayagan have been delayed indefinitely over the past few months as political pressures hold off certification and theatrical showcasing, adding to the inventory of unreleased films in India.The former film, previously titled Battle of Galwan, was to have been released in April, and is fighting a China angle as the government softens its stand towards the neighbouring country. Lead actor-turned-politician Vijay’s film was to have been released in January but has faced intense scrutiny and certification issues ahead of assembly elections in Tamil Nadu.Such delays for films have been seen earlier, adding to costs and expenses, disrupting OTT showcasing, and even having to be majorly re-edited or not released at all.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.India is planning to build a six-month strategic reserve of critical minerals to shield its green energy and manufacturing sectors from supply shocks and price swings, two people aware of the matter said. The Union ministries of mines and heavy industries are working on a plan to stockpile imported and locally sourced critical minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper and rare earth elements, a segment dominated by China.The strategic reserve will act as a long-term safeguard for sectors such as electric mobility, energy storage and electronics manufacturing, which are increasingly dependent on imports, the people cited above said on the condition of anonymity.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.China emerged largely unscathed at a time when the West Asia war battered nearly every major emerging market economy through higher energy prices and their ripple effects. The dragon retained its top rank on Mint’s Emerging Markets Tracker (EMT) for March 2026.India, by contrast, slipped three places to sixth as the conflict intensified rupee depreciation, foreign outflows and export weakness.The divergence underscores a widening gap in external-sector stability.