India Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mapusa market, especially on Fridays, throbs with activity. It’s the day when smaller businesses set up their stalls in this market in north Goa, selling trinkets, gifts and other odds and ends. At the heart of it is the enclosed municipal market, which has its usual assortment of vegetable sellers.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Benne dosa for ₹99”, reads a board outside Maa Annapurna, a small eatery tucked between coffee shops and snack joints in a residential neighbourhood in Mumbai’s western suburb of Andheri. The menu has the usual idli-vada, chaat and pav bhaji. But the real draw is the benne dosa. With the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan campus a few blocks away, it has, in just a couple of weeks, become a favourite among students and those in nearby PG accommodations.Even as his small eatery clocks over 100 benne dosas daily, owner Animesh Shah says he is perplexed by the long queues at a popular dosa spot in the city.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Is there anyone who doesn't know that Monday, May 4, is Met Gala? Social media and conversations everywhere are awash about the annual fashion gala that has, in the last few years, turned into a global spectacle that's impossible to ignore or replicate. As is custom, the gala's theme this year is “Costume Art” that places focus on the "centrality of the dressed body".The dress code for the event being chaired by Beyoncé, Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour, along with honorary chairs Jeff and Lauren Bezos, is “Fashion Is Art”.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.GANDHINAGAR: Six listed companies have applied for licences to set up corporate treasury centres in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, or GIFT City, said Kalyanaraman Rajaraman, chairperson of the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA).The applications signal rising interest in India’s offshore financial hub as large companies look to centralize global cash and risk management. While the regulator declined to identify the applicants, Rajaraman said demand is likely to rise over time.“We have issued 10 authorizations till date… we are talking to almost every MNC (multinational company).

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.BENGALURU: Reliance Retail has acquired Anomaly Haircare, the global haircare label founded by actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas, as it accelerates its push into beauty and personal care.The dealincludes ownership of trademarks and digital assets with plans to scale the brand across India and global markets using Reliance’s omnichannel ecosystem, including its Tira platform, it said in a statement on Thursday.Mint unpacks why Reliance Retail is assembling a celebrity-led brand portfolio despite these companies reporting losses.Reliance Retail’s playbook has increasingly leaned on star power. The company had bought a majority stake in actor Alia Bhatt’s kidswear brand Ed-a-Mamma in July 2023.It acquired a 40% stake in celebrity stylist Manish Malhotra’s luxury ethnic wear brand MM Styles in 2021, and bought a majority stake in celebrity stylist Ritu Kumar’s label the same year.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) ended FY26 on a good note, clocking an underlying volume growth of 6% for the three months through March (Q4FY26), a multi-quarter high, supported by steady demand across both rural and urban markets. The improvement is notable, with volume growth rising from 4% in Q3 after a muted Q2, when volumes were broadly flat. The company expects FY27 to be stronger than FY26, driven by portfolio shifts and channel transformation.The durability of this recovery, however, will be tested in the coming quarters.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Asset management companies (AMCs) largely held up their full-year earnings performance in FY26, but mark-to-market losses stemming from the West Asia conflict dented their latest quarterly profit. Listed AMCs recorded a sequential decrease in net profit or a loss in the January-March quarter.ICICI Prudential AMC reported a 16.8% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) decline in net profit to ₹763 crore in Q4.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Global payments network Visa is stepping up its push for merchant acceptance in India as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) cements its lead in everyday digital payments, a top Visa India executive told Mint. The company is betting that cheaper acceptance tools, card-based subscriptions, and a broader set of payment choices can help it win share among both small and large merchants.Ramakrishnan Gopalan, chief product officer, India and South Asia at Visa, said the company’s first pitch to merchants is built around consumer choice.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.New Delhi: Luxury retailer Burgundy Brand Collective aims to cross ₹200 crore in revenuein FY27, as the Mumbai-based company bets on rising premium consumption beyond India’s top metros.The company, which has introduced brands such as Royce’ Chocolate, Onitsuka Tiger, Jacadi Paris and Ligne Roset to India, plans to invest about ₹100 crore to scale its multi-category portfolio, cofounder Samir Gadhok told Mint.Burgundy, which reported sales of ₹120 crore in FY24, also plans to nearly double its store count over the next three years to about 65 stores.The expansion comes as India’s luxury consumption story broadens to newer cities where affluent consumers are spending more across categories from fashion and food to home and lifestyle.Burgundy’s approach has been to build across categories rather than deepen a single vertical. "We want to be everything to one customer, rather than one thing to everyone,” said Gadhok.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Diagnostics major Dr. Lal Path Labs saw revenue improve 17% year-on-year to ₹703 crore in the March quarter (Q4FY26), beating consensus estimate by 5%. The jump was primarily led by higher sample volumes and better realizations.Revenue grew 12.2% to ₹2,763 crore in FY26.

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 India Meteorological Department's (IMD) seasonal outlook for summer 2026 warns of above-normal heatwave days, with rising nighttime temperatures compounding daytime heat stress across east, central, northwest India, and the southeast peninsula.Latest data showed that 19 of the world's 20 hottest cities were located in India.With multiple cities across Bihar, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, and Maharashtra logging temperatures around 44°C, well above seasonal norms, large parts of India are in the grip of an intense and widespread heatwave.Crucially, rising nighttime temperatures are a growing concern. Warmer nights reduce recovery from heat stress, driving up energy demand significantly.As summers grow longer and hotter, the demand for cooling is no longer seasonal.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.State-owned Uco Bank expects its micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) portfolio to remain stable despite global headwinds, managing director and chief executive officer Ashwani Kumar told Mint in an interview on Thursday. The bank is eyeing a retail lending boost and is stepping up investments in technology to drive growth, he said.While geopolitical tensions and supply-chain disruptions could have some impact, Kumar expressed confidence that policy support would help cushion the sector.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For years, the only way to get workstation-class performance in a portable form factor was to buy a gaming laptop. You put up with the aggressive "gamer" aesthetics—the neon RGB lighting and the bulky, tank-like chassis—because that was the only way to get the necessary horsepower.Today, that category is being quietly rewritten as hardware makers recognise that a growing share of their most demanding users aren’t gamers at all—they’re creators.And this isn’t just a marketing pivot.During a recent conversation with Paramjeet Singh Mehta, Product and Marketing Head for Consumer PC & Gaming at ASUS India, the scale of this transition became clear.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The House of Rare aims to evolve beyond apparel into a broader lifestyle-led retail powerhouse as it expands into categories such as fragrances, luggage and women’s footwear, while also betting on faster delivery timelines and quick-commerce-led fashion discovery.Founded over a decade ago, Bengaluru-based The House of Rare owns a portfolio of premium fashion brands, including men’s label Rare Rabbit, women’s line Rareism, kidswear brand Rare Ones, and footwear venture Rare’Z.“The idea is to expand into different categories which fit the brand ecosystem and target the lifestyle of the urban consumer,” Akshika Poddar, founder of Rareism from The House of Rare, said in an interview with Mint.The expansion comes at a time when premium fashion retailers in India are increasingly looking beyond core apparel to build wider lifestyle ecosystems around consumers, while also adapting to shopping habits shaped by quick commerce and faster delivery expectations. As competition intensifies in the premium westernwear segment, brands are also pushing deeper into tier-2 and tier-3 markets to tap rising aspirational demand.The company is set to launch women’s sneakers in June, and plans to introduce girlswear under its kidswear brand Rare Ones by January next year, while also scaling categories such as luggage and fragrances.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Talk of the Indian rupee at 100 to the dollar is back. The currency has been among the worst performers globally since 2025, and 2026 hasn’t offered much relief. It has continued to weaken, even as the 95 level against the US dollar holds, for now.The rupee on Thursday settled at 94.84 against the dollar, up 4 paise on the day—little to change the broader direction.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The top private and state-owned defence companies are looking at a ₹15 trillion revenue opportunity over the next five fiscal years, according to brokerage Dam Capital on 27 April, as rising government capital expenditure and an export push combine to reshape the country's arms sector into a global supplier.The windfall is being spread across five big firms, Hindustan Aeronautics, Bharat Electronics, Bharat Dynamics, Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders, and Larsen & Toubro's Precision Engineering & Systems division, with exports projected to be over ₹72,000 crore for the period, according to industry projections and company disclosures. Defence exports already hit ₹38,424 crore in FY26, as per defence ministry data, and the government has set a target of ₹50,000 crore by FY29 at a compounded annual growth rate of 9%.The exports are being driven by two key points: increasing localized production of light to heavy artillery, and the latter leading to exports of India-made defence equipment to regions such as West Asia, central and south-east Asia, and Africa as well.This is a change for the country.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.A clarification by the Reserve Bank of India has undercut Tata Sons’ attempt to distance itself from public funds, potentially retaining it in the upper layer of non-bank financial companies (NBFCs), a category that entails tighter regulation and a mandatory listing requirement.The move complicates matters for the holding company of the Tata group, which has been trying to stay private, especially since RBI introduced its scale-based supervision of non-bank lenders.Late Wednesday, the central bank said it has received feedback that the mention of ‘indirect public funds’ in its draft non-banking financial company (NBFC) circular of 6 February leads to treating equity investment in an NBFC by group entities having debt as ‘indirect receipt of public funds’.Per RBI, public funds include funds raised either directly or indirectly through public deposits, inter-corporate deposits, bank finance and all funds received from external sources.Mint had reported in 2024 that Tata Sons had turned debt-free in a bid to avoid getting listed under the upper layer regulations and surrendered its registration as a core investment company (CIC). The RBI is yet to communicate its decision on this issue.A former regulator said the earlier argument was that since Tata Sons does not have public funds, it can give up its CIC registration, not be in the upper layer, and therefore can stay private, does not hold water.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Last month, France did something that would have been unimaginable a few years ago; certainly before the outbreak of the Ukraine war, when US-led sanctions cut Russia off from the Swift payment system, the main messaging network that enables secure international financial transactions, and froze more than $300 billion of its assets. Its central bank, the Bank of France, pulled out its remaining gold reserves held in New York. Admittedly, no central bank today relies on gold to back its currency.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Reliance Industries Ltd’s recent sale of a second-level step-down subsidiary to a little-known company may test the limits of regulation on related-party transactions even while technically keeping to the rules, said legal and governance experts.On 13 April, Reliance Retail Ltd sold its subsidiary, Reliance Projects & Property Management Services Ltd (RPPMSL), to Jaipur Enclave Pvt. Ltd for ₹ ₹274 crore, according to a stock exchange filing.The sale consideration is small compared to the scale of the sold unit.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Lose weight quickly, and it often shows up on the face first. As fat disappears, the skin can sag, accentuating signs of ageing.