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The Academy Awards — the most glamorous night in Hollywood — is synonymous with opulence, prestige, and the crème de la crème of the entertainment world. With A-list stars strutting down the red carpet and the Dolby Theatre glittering under the spotlight, one would expect every aspect of the ceremony to carry an exorbitant price tag — especially for the evening's host. However, what might leave you truly stunned is just how little Oscars hosts are paid for orchestrating one of the world's most-watched events.

The repeated failure of small- and big-ticket films has skewed the market in favour of a few deep-pocketed streamers such as Netflix, Prime Video and JioHotStar (see chart). Three years ago, the industry was in a sellers' market, where producers and filmmakers had plenty of options to secure funding. With at least 10 mainstream streamers and a strong presence of production houses and studios actively creating and acquiring content, there was healthy competition, giving content creators more bargaining power.

Coal India arm NCL will soon commence its Rs 24,000-crore rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R) project to relocate from Morwa township in Madhya Pradesh's Singrauli, a top company official said on Sunday. The relocation, under the 'Singrauli Punarasthapan' project, will involve shifting around 50,000 people and 22,500 houses from the township spread across 927 hectares. Singrauli sits atop around 600 million tonnes of mineable coal. «This is a huge project estimated at Rs 24,000 crore. We are in the advanced stages of negotiations with all four residents' associations regarding benefits and relaxations in documentation requirements. The good thing is that people have agreed to relocate,» Northern Coalfields Ltd (NCL) Chairman and Managing Director B Sairam told PTI. The township's relocation was necessitated as NCL's Jayant coal mine is expanding and expected to come within 500 metres of the residential area in the next two years, which would hinder mining operations, he said.

DeepSeek revealed some financial numbers on Saturday, saying its “theoretical” profit margin could be more than five times costs, peeling back a layer of the secrecy that shrouds business models in the AI industry. The 20-month-old startup that rattled Silicon Valley with its innovative and inexpensive approach to building AI models, said on X its V3 and R1 models’ cost of inferencing to sales during a 24-hour-period on the last day of February put profit margins at 545%. Inferencing refers to the computing power, electricity, data storage and other resources needed to make AI models work in real time.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Four years ago, Xiaomi was a successful smartphone business and its car business consisted of nothing more than a plan approved by the board and a vow by billionaire founder Lei Jun to make it work. This year, the company’s assembly lines are set to turn out 300,000 vehicles, and it has already shipped more than 135,000 in less than a year on the market.

Tanaji Sawant of the Shiv Sena had awarded the project for 'mechanised cleaning services' in government run hospitals, primary health clinics. There were allegations that the cost of these equipments were highly inflated and also the contracts were given to companies that had no prior experience of running such a project. Maharashtra government officials said that there were complaints about the tender as it was causing a huge loss to the state exchequer. For instance, while the annual contract would have cost Rs 638 crores for a year, previously the government used to spend Rs 70 crores annually on this.

L Catterton India and former Managing Director HUL, Sanjiv Mehta said on Saturday. He also said that the India-focussed joint venture that he formed with global investment firm L Catterton's Asian arm to develop a new investment vehicle is primarily focused on consumers, which is his «sweet spot… „If you look at the investment journey, this entire private equity journey, it starts with identifying where you want to invest. Then you look at identifying what could be your potential investment in a portfolio company. Then you decide the timing of investment and how much to invest. Then it is the classical creation of value. And the value is what I described, how technology will reshape value creation,“ Mehta said at the Mumbai Tech Week, which concluded here on Saturday. Noting that the last thing is determining when to exit, he said that's the whole value chain of private equity.

electric two-wheelers a viable option for India's large middle class, a major driver of the nation's two-wheeler market? India's two-wheeler market has been largely driven by middle-class households. While a shift towards a greener lifestyle is a shared aspiration, affordability has been a key concern. Although initial purchase prices presented a barrier, government incentives and schemes have made electric vehicles more accessible and attractive to this segment.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Building a retirement portfolio can be simple. Spending it down is tricky.

AI startup DeepSeek on Saturday disclosed some cost and revenue data related to its hit V3 and R1 models, claiming a theoretical cost-profit ratio of up to 545% per day, though it cautioned that actual revenue would be significantly lower. This marks the first time the Hangzhou-based company has revealed any information about its profit margins from less computationally intensive «inference» tasks, the stage after training that involves trained AI models making predictions or performing tasks, such as through chatbots. The revelation could further rattle AI stocks outside China that plunged in January after web and app chatbots powered by its R1 and V3 models surged in popularity worldwide.

Punjab National Bank has reduced its External Benchmark Linked Rate (EBLR) with effect from March 1, 2025. All new floating rate loans from a bank are now linked to EBLR and any change in EBLR will corresponding impact on the EMIs. In case a bank cuts EBLR the borrower will see their EMIs fall or tenure come down based on the choice they make after the rate cut. PNB on the other hand, has increased its marginal cost of funds based lending rate (MCLR) for loans with effect from March 1, 2025. Before the EBLR regime came in force banks were lending on the basis of MCLR which has been used as a benchmark interest rate by banks to determine the minimum rate at which they can lend money. However, those old borrowers who have their floating rate loans still linked to MCLR regime has now got the option to shift to EBLR regime whenever they wish. Read below to know what are the new PNB EBLR and MCLR rates

«In order to pave the way for the implementation of leader Apo's call for peace and democratic society, we are declaring a ceasefire effective from today,» the PKK executive committee said in a statement quoted by the pro-PKK ANF news agency, referring to Ocalan. «We agree with the content of the call as it is and we say that we will follow and implement it,» the committee said.

Union Health Minister JP Nadda on Saturday flagged off the Jan Aushadhi Raths to kick off the Jan Aushadhi Saptah being celebrated from March 1 to March 7. Speaking at the flag off, Nadda said that under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi the government targets to open 20,000 Jan Aushadhi centres by the end of 2025 and 27,000 centres by 2027. «We have an ambitious target that under the leadership of PM and by 2027, we will reach 25,000 Jan Aushadhi centres… We started with 80 centres, today there are 15,000 centres and we will increase it to 20,000 by the end of this year and we will reach 25,000 centres next year...» Nadda said speaking at the flag off.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. AU Small Finance Bank has cemented its position as a market leader, with a strong track record spanning over two decades and assets exceeding ₹1 trillion. Its extensive presence across the country, particularly in semi-urban and rural areas, has bolstered its deep distribution network.

The United States sends tremendous support to its allies around the world, but the payback has typically been a more stable world — it doesn’t always work, mind you, as we have seen these past three years. But no country benefits more from a tranquil world than the U.S.

Jio Platforms, the telecom and digital arm of Reliance Industries, is building an AI personal computer in the cloud which is compatible with any consumer screen and will allow users to build compute-intensive AI applications, Aakash Ambani, chairman, Reliance Jio Infocomm said. He added that companies which do not embrace AI and reimagine their functions will have a “bleak” future. Further, he believes that AI will transform the future of jobs but won’t replace them. “We have a consumer application which we will be shortly launching. It’s a cloud PC, which is a complete PC in the cloud, which is accessible in each of your houses but really be device agnostic. No hardware. You can build high compute AI applications on top of that. And what you can leverage is the reach that Jio has,” Ambani said at the Mumbai Tech Week on Friday.

«For midcap or smallcap, that could be a different story. But in the largecap space, the valuations have become very attractive. A couple of percentage points more of correction cannot be ruled out,» says Devender Singhal, Kotak Mahindra AMC. First up on the markets, nothing has been holding up. Since all this while we have been talking about the broader indices, getting into that bear territory, but look at Nifty 50 is down about 15% from those highest points of September 2024. Do you believe that another 5% correction from here on cannot be ruled out or you believe that at the index level we should find some bit of a base building? Devender Singhal: So, yes, you are right, we have seen around 15% correction in the Nifty. But there has not been a single year in the last 30 years where we have not seen something like this happening. But honestly, it looks like in terms of valuation comfort, we are very near to the bottom or the immediate bottom in terms of where the Nifty or largecaps are concerned.

World Bank report released on Friday.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. India's two largest steelmakers have diverging strategies on the acquisition of captive iron ore mines for securing the supply of this critical raw material. JSW Steel, which has historically had more reliance on the open market to meet its iron ore demand, is aggressively bidding for acquiring more captive mines, or mines under its leasehold.