Country Financial News

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.WASHINGTON—Just weeks after President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz “COMPLETELY OPEN AND READY FOR BUSINESS” only to see ship traffic stall, the administration is now asking other countries to join a new international coalition that would enable ships to navigate the waterway.The effort, called the “Maritime Freedom Construct,” was spelled out in an internal State Department cable sent to U.S. embassies on Tuesday that called on U.S.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.New Delhi: India's summer (zaid) crops, including maize, moong, and groundnut, have remained resilient despite scorching heat across several parts of the country. However, an extended heatwave could hurt both yields and crop quality, a senior agricultural scientist warned on Wednesday.Field reports suggest that these short-duration crops, grown between rabi and kharif seasons, are largely holding up, supported by timely irrigation, M.L.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Over the past few weeks, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) stocks have drawn renewed investor attention. Traditionally, the sector, alongside IT, has been seen as a defensive play during market volatility.The Nifty FMCG index has rallied sharply since early April 2026.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.India is currently the world’s fastest-growing major economy, a headline that invites optimism as we sprint past the $4 trillion milestone. But for most of the 1.4 billion-plus people who live in the country, headline GDP has become a mere dashboard metric—high on transactional velocity but low on household dignity. We are witnessing a historic rupture: the link between economic growth and job creation, once the singular pulse of development, has been functionally severed.A forensic audit of India’s structural shift from 1991 to 2026 reveals a catastrophic decline in the job efficiency of our growth.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The International Monetary Fund in its recent spring meeting abandoned its single global growth forecast. It now presents three scenarios: 3.1% growth with 4.4% inflation, 2.5% growth with 5.4% inflation, or 2% growth with inflation above 6%, depending on how long the Strait of Hormuz stays shut. The International Energy Agency has called the 2026 disruption the worst energy shock the world has ever seen.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.PROJECT GENIE, an experimental artificial-intelligence model released by Google in January, is a jaw-dropping technical achievement. Give the tool a prompt—an image, say, or a brief snippet of text—and it will generate an interactive world for the user to explore.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.WHEN THE Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) meets on April 29th, the club will be contemplating the departure of one of its longest-standing members. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has been part of the cartel since Abu Dhabi joined in 1967, has announced it will leave on May 1st. The war in Iran and its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have choked off the region’s energy exports, hammering the UAE and its neighbours in the Gulf.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The UAE's exit from the global oil cartels may be good for India, the world's third-largest oil buyer, sector experts said.The exit comes at a time when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) has been trying to cap production amid a global oil crisis. The UAE decision may weaken Opec's control over oil prices and result in more energy purchases by India, experts said."This decision aligns with the UAE’s long-term strategic and economic vision and the evolution of its energy sector, including accelerating investment in domestic energy production, while reinforcing its commitment to its role as a responsible and reliable producer looking to the future of global energy markets," the Emirates' energy ministry wrote on X.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Nearly 70% of Indians lack meaningful health insurance. Our penetration rate— just 0.35% of GDP—is lower than that of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The conventional explanation is that Indians either do not understand insurance or cannot afford it.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.When NV Group launched Smoke Lab, it aimed to do vodka differently—ditching familiar citrus and berry profiles for local flavours.“When we started doing flavours, nobody was thinking about Indian flavours. Everybody was doing orange, lime, lemon and raspberry.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Meta Platforms is preparing to have to unwind its acquisition of the artificial-intelligence startup Manus after China banned the transaction on national-security grounds Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.Meta bought Manus, a China-linked, Singapore-based startup that specializes in building AI agents, in December for $2.5 billion, and quickly moved to integrate the new technology into its systems. Any attempt to undo the acquisition would mean disentangling the two.In another complication, Manus’s investors, which include California-based venture-capital firm Benchmark, have already received their returns, people with knowledge of the matter said.Meta garners significant revenues from Chinese advertisers who target consumers outside China, despite Facebook and other Meta apps being blocked in the country.Several former Manus investors in Asia, including Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund, have planned to cooperate if Meta goes ahead to unwind the deal, some of the people said.Beijing has handed the two companies a preliminary deadline of several weeks to unwind the deal and fully restore Manus’s Chinese assets to their original state, some of the people said.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Sun Pharma would appear to have got itself a sweet deal when it agreed to acquire all outstanding shares of US-based Organon for $3.7 billion in cash at $14 per share.The US pharma company had outstanding debt of $8.6 billion at the end of 2025, annual sales of $6.2 billion and adjusted Ebitda of $1.9 billion (i.e., earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization). Its enterprise value of $11.75 billion, as widely reported, is the sum of its stock value and debt, less cash on hand.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Mumbai: India’s second-biggest overseas acquisition was stitched together over three months of near-daily negotiations between the bidder, the seller and their bankers, said a banker aware of the details behind the transaction.Mumbai-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd on Monday said in an exchange filing it will acquire US-headquartered Organon & Co for about $11.75 billion. This is the largest overseas deal by an Indian company since Tata Steel acquired UK-based Corus Group for $12 billion in 2007.The deal was always pitched at around $12 billion from both sides, with negotiations neither exceeding nor materially falling from that level, the person cited above said on the condition of anonymity.“The deal was out in the market sometime late 2025, and Sun was very interested because it gave them access to more than 100 countries across the world and also complemented the product suite,” said the banker.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.MUMBAI: Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) plans to scale up its corporate finance team in India and expand into new sectors, as the New York-based consulting firm positions itself to capture a rise in dealmaking and sustained capital inflows into the country, senior executives said.The expansion comes amid a shift in global investor strategy towards long-term capital deployment in India, driven by strong underlying fundamentals, high-growth prospects and elevated public market valuations that are pushing deal activity, including cross-border transactions.“We are building a highly sector-specialized corporate finance team, that integrates seamlessly with the firm’s other offerings,” said Mohit Khullar, managing director and head of corporate finance at Alvarez & Marsal India.The firm’s corporate finance practice currently spans consumer, industrials, healthcare and pharma, with the recent addition of Nitin Lath as managing director for the sector.“We will specialize within pharma, with a strong focus on Indian branded formulations, niche generics and speciality pharma, as well as CDMOs (contract development and manufacturing organization) and APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients),” Lath said. “The pharma industry is undergoing a period of transformation, with several players re evaluating their business models and actively pursuing large M&A opportunities, including cross border transactions across the US and Europe.”Khullar said the firm will also expand into additional sectors such as financial services and technology in the coming months.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.JSW MG Motor India Pvt. Ltd, the joint venture between China’s SAIC Motor Corp.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.For years, the global AI race focused on frontier models, faster chips and massive capital. The US still leads this phase, with its hyperscalers ready to roll out massive expansions of data centre capacity as soon as labour, chip and power availability catch up. China, however, is shifting its strategy.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.The jagged path of India’s stock market attests to how shaky the mood of investors is. Although the Sensex is up 6.6% in April (while the Nifty-50 index rose 7%) after its 12% tumble in war-stricken March (the Nifty-50 slid more than 11%), last week ended on a glum note.A tentative truce in West Asia may have mostly silenced the blasts of war, but the lifting smoke revealed a double choke of Hormuz, with even Iran’s oil trapped, like the exports of other Gulf countries. As this US-Iran deadlock is proving harder to break than a level-headed analysis of it would suggest, the war’s impact on India’s economy might still be gaining in intensity.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering (HD KSOE) is likely to begin groundwork next month on India’s first greenfield shipyard by a global shipbuilder, entailing an investment of ₹40,000 crore, according to two people aware of the development.The company, part of South Korea’s HD Hyundai Group, is expected to sign a definitive investment agreement with the Centre and the Tamil Nadu government after the ongoing state elections to set up a mega manufacturing facility at the Thoothukudi shipbuilding cluster, the people cited earlier said on condition of anonymity. The investment pact follows a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed on 7 December 2025 by HD Hyundai with the Tamil Nadu government for the shipyard.HD KSOE is likely to invest about ₹40,000 crore in the project in phases, which is expected to have an annual production capacity of 3.5 million gross tonnage (GT).

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.India is moving fast on clean energy. Solar capacity is rising, electric vehicle (EV) sales are climbing and green hydrogen is now part of official strategy. But beneath this momentum sits a less visible constraint in the form of the materials required to build this future.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—President Trump scrapped a trip by U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Pakistan for talks with Iran, leaving himself tough choices over how to force Iran to make concessions the White House wants to strike a deal.Trump said on Saturday that he had decided to cancel the trip after receiving an offer from Iran that fell short of the White House’s expectations.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Earlier this week, commerce minister Piyush Goyal said that India and South Korea were working towards doubling bilateral trade while reviewing a 16-year-old trade agreement between them.Signed in 2010, the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) has seen bilateral trade more than double, but with a greater share of gains accruing to South Korea. Speaking to the media at an India-Korea business forum, Goyal said this agreement “has not worked for India” and that a review was being undertaken to bring about “more balanced trade between the two countries”.