On Episode 931 of The Core Report, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj talks to Nikit Popli, Partner, Indirect Tax and Incentives at KPMG as well as Shub Bhowmick, Co-founder and CEO at Tredence. We also feature an excerpt from Episode 4 of our Series Eye on Retail in partnership with Flipkart.

SHOW NOTES

(00:00) The Take

(05:57) Stocks Have A Good Week But May Not Survive The Resumption Of War.

(06:50) Banking, Reliance Results Come In Strong.

(08:54) What Will The 127,000 Crore India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 Outlay Deliver?

(16:40) How Does Agentic Commerce Work And What Determines Its Effectiveness?

(26:58) Chinese AI Company Moonshot Released Kimi K3 Friday, Claiming Benchmarks Comparable To Top US LLMs.

(28:13) Can India’s $60 Billion E-Commerce Market Drive Consumption?

Check out our clean power tracker https://cleanpower.thecore.in/

—

NOTE: This transcript contains the host's monologue and includes interview transcripts by a machine. Human eyes have gone through the script but there might still be errors in some of the text, so please refer to the audio in case you need to clarify any part. If you want to get in touch regarding any feedback, you can drop us a message on feedback@thecore.in.

Good morning, it's Monday the 20th of July and this is Govindraj Ethiraj broadcasting and streaming weekdays, usually from Mumbai, India's financial capital, but in transit now and here's the other message. The core will take a break this week as I'm off on a conference and will resume next week. And now…

The Take

Space startup Skyroot Aerospace on Saturday launched India's first privately developed orbital rocket, a key test of India's efforts to capture a larger share of the global commercial launch market. The 22 metre Vikram 1 rocket lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota on Saturday morning, carrying several customer payloads and in-orbit experiments on its maiden orbital mission called Mission Agaman. It also successfully injected its payload into a 450 kilometre orbit roughly 15 minutes later.

Now this makes India only the third country to achieve orbital launch capability via private enterprise. Now Skyroot was founded in 2018 and India's space sector was opened to private companies in 2020. One could argue that it took six years from the sector's opening up to private entrance for a company run by entrepreneurs to raise capital, build a viable product and successfully reach orbit.

While other space tech ventures are quietly developing in offices and sheds across Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai, the launch of Vikram 1 is the newsmaking breakthrough the industry, particularly private one, has been waiting for. Now the question is whether this milestone could serve as a broader Philip and fresh reminder for private enterprise to drive India's economic growth. While the private sector has played an undeniable role and more so since the 1990s, the state continues to exert a heavy operational hand in major industries from steel and oil to power and defence, where sectors have opened up assertively or in retreat.

Private capital in most cases has rushed in quickly and created globally competitive products or services. And the examples are too many to enumerate because we all consume them almost every day. Now this is not a renewed call for aggressive disinvestment or privatisation, a topic endlessly debated with limited action.

Nor is it meant to diminish the Indian space research organisations or ISRO's mighty contribution over the decades in building an indigenous space programme. Rather it's about asking where else private enterprise can solve some of the biggest challenges facing India and its citizens. It is also a necessary reminder of the steep cost of delaying private capital and the inevitable misallocation of public resources that follows.

Now we still see this across sectors from airports to telecom in some shape or form, though the tide is slowly turning. Private participation in America's space endeavours began in the 1960s with Telstar 1, a communications satellite launched on a rocket owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA, the independent agency established by then President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958. ISRO was set up in 1969 but it superseded the Indian National Committee for Space Research which was established in 1962 by Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, the namesake of Saturday's rocket.

Looking back the convergence and divergence and approaches is illustrative. Both nations saw merit in joining the space race started by the Soviet Union when it launched Sputnik 1 into orbit in 1957. But America opted for a mix of public and private partnerships to drive its response and eventual programmes.

India stuck rigidly to the public sector opening up to private players as we just spoke only about 50 years later. Could India's space programme have advanced differently had the private sector played a front-facing role right from the start rather than for instance applying components to it? Perhaps. Of course India was on a different economic trajectory then with the state dominating most areas of life and space was no exception.

And America of course embraced private enterprise across a much broader swath of industries more than a century earlier. Space offers a prime example of managing public and private interests through active government regulation. It demonstrates that with sharp-sighted legislative oversight the private sector can be simultaneously nurtured and effectively regulated.

Nuclear power also comes to mind. While many countries operate privately run nuclear power corporations and at scale India has struggled to attract private capital to the sector hampered by a lack of policy and a lack of regulation. From collecting garbage to manufacturing fighter jets the role of government in these areas deserves consistent and critical appraisal and there are many more areas.

Having made the case for private enterprise it must be acknowledged that private capital also carries its own risks. Consider the recent trajectory of Elon Musk's SpaceX. Since mid-June its shares have fallen from about $225 to $127 dropping more than 40 percent and going below its blockbuster IPO price.

Analysts attribute the latest sell-off in the stock partly to a failed rocket launch. While the stock may stabilise over the long term it is a stark illustration of how markets punish failure but crucially the risk and the financial pain are borne by Elon Musk and his merry band of investors not the US taxpayer. Skyroot will inevitably face its own setbacks such as the unforgiving nature of space exploration but when these disappointments come the risk rightly will belong to private capital.

And that brings us to the top stories and themes…

Stocks have a good week but may not survive the full resumption of war.

Banking and reliance results come in strong.

What will the 127,000 crore India semiconductor mission 2.0 outlet deliver?

How does agentic commerce work and what determines its effectiveness?

Chinese AI company Moonshot releases Kimi K3 last week claiming benchmarks comparable to top US AI models.

And can India's 60 billion dollar e-commerce market drive consumption?

Markets, Bank Stocks, Oil and Reliance

The major indices had their best gains in order month on Friday thanks to spikes in index heavies like Reliance Industries and HTFC Bank. The Sensex was up 965 points to 78,152 and the Nifty was up 262 points to 24,334.

Friday's gain is the biggest since June 12, 2026. But war has effectively resumed in West Asia. A week of back and forth strikes by both sides has expanded beyond strictly military targets to include bridges, utilities and port facilities suggesting little prospect of a return to the fragile ceasefire signed last month according to a Bloomberg report.

Crude prices are now around $88 a barrel inching towards $90 and close to the figures economists have been using to estimate impact on economies like India. The question therefore is did the oil markets celebrate too soon? For that we have to wait and see in the week ahead.

Back home most banks have put out strong results.

HDFC Bank net profit rose 5%, net interest income grew 7%, ICICI's net profit was up 16% thanks to healthy interest income growth and lower provisions. Axis Bank net profits rose 23% beating street estimates. Kotak Mahindra's consolidated net profit was up 23% and the common theme across all these banks of course is the net interest rate margin compression from rate cuts offset by loan growth and lower provisioning.

In the non-bank space Reliance Industries beat market expectations for first quarter net profit on Friday thanks to strong performances from its oil to chemicals retail and telecom businesses. Reliance's consolidated net profit was down 22% to about 20,900 crore rupees for the quarter ended June 30 but that beat analysts average estimate of about 18,500 crore rupees according to data compiled by LSEG. The decline in net profit was primarily due to a one-off gain from a stake sale in Asian Pins in the year ago quarter according to Reuters which added that operating performance across Reliance's three verticals improved and core earnings in the oil to chemicals business which includes refining rose about 17% from a year earlier which the company attributed to all-time high middle distillate cracks and improved downstream deltas.

The telecom business that's geo platforms also continued to grow reporting core earnings growth of 15% of 533 million strong subscriber base and an average revenue per user of 215 rupees according to that Reuters report. Digital services and retail accounted for more than half of Reliance's operating earnings and in currencies the rupee logged its sharpest weekly drop since May closing at 96 rupees 28 paisa per dollar down about one percent week on week thanks also to that 13 percent rise in Brent crude oil prices according to Reuters. A forex salesperson at a foreign bank told Reuters that exporters have once again withdrawn from the market anticipating further weakness and importers are not inclined to let any dip on the USD INR rates go.

Government Investment in Semiconductors

The government last week cleared several projects including a 127,000 crore rupee outlay for the second edition of India's semiconductor mission and 62,500 crore rupees for the mobile phone manufacturing scheme. A report in the Hindu quoted the government saying it expects to attract investments of around 400,000 crore rupees and lead to semiconductor production worth about 200,000 crore rupees during the scheme's period. The new addition of the semiconductor programme has provisions to incentivise even suppliers of raw materials in the chip manufacturing industry including minerals and gases and also expects to attract investment from other chip segments to meet chip requirements.

The government also said that Semicon 2.0 as it's called will have six pillars. The first pillar will be the design of chips and the programme will focus on design development and production of indigenous chips. The first edition saw about 76,000 crore being allotted under which the government approved 12 projects with investments of about 164,000 crore rupees.

I reached out to Nikit Popli, partner indirect tax and incentives at consulting firm KPMG and who has been working in this area to go through some of the details of this latest announcement and how this is different and what it has achieved so far.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Nikit Popli: The first semiconductor mission was rolled out about three years back when government took a very ambitious step in rolling out a mission for promoting semiconductor, fab, OSAT facilities, packaging facilities in India. There are 12 projects which were approved under the semiconductor mission. Two of them are already on ground.

The chip manufacturing has started happening in those. That is something that we've all seen. Now, what the government is trying to do in the semiconductor too is that they are wanting to get the entire ecosystem as well into it.

Now, to manufacture semiconductor, there is a fabrication process. Now, fabrication involves a lot of material components as well. Now, under this semiconductor mission, it is not only the final product that the government is trying to cover.

The materials, the gases, the chemicals, everything gets covered in it, including the equipment that is required for manufacturing these. So, it is not only about the scale or the assembly now, it is more about the depth that we are trying to build. The budget outlay is there.

The government, one very good thing that has happened in this scheme is that the government has realised that it is not a five-year game which was there in semiconductor mission one. It is a larger period in which this entire ecosystem can be built. Now, this scheme is for 12 years and not for five years, unlike the earlier scheme.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Yeah. So, the government will contribute this to as roughly half of its investment into all the projects that are coming up. Basically, what's the total outlay that is going to emerge once all this money goes in?

Nikit Popli: Govind, one, the fine print of this is yet awaited, right? The guidelines and everything. In the semiconductor mission one, it was flat 50% which the government contributed as a capital cost.

So, whatever you contribute, 50%, you will get from the central government, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. In this, there are six different pillars in which the subsidy would come. Now, materials may get higher subsidy, fab may get a lower subsidy because this time they have included not just every fab, some advanced fabs.

Advanced fabs get higher subsidy, not too advanced get a lower subsidy. As a thumb rule, it should be somewhere around 25 to 50% for different products that the government should contribute.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And two projects that have begun manufacturing or rolling out, what is the market like for it right now?

Nikit Popli: I think offtake in this industry is not a problem. This is a product which is required in everything from a fan in your home to a missile launcher, right? So, this product is required everywhere.

And globally, China has been dominating, Taiwan has been dominating, US. For India, it was a bold step to get into this. So, offtake, the market is not a problem.

I think they'll see enough and more market, not only domestically, but internationally as well.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And just to come back, two projects are rolling and there are 10 more. And what's the pace of, let's say, construction or project completion so far?

Nikit Popli: Most of them, I think in, like I said, it's a five-year scheme that we had, right? So, three years back, the scheme was rolled out. Some of the approvals came late last year.

So, in next three to four years, we will see most of them up and running in terms of their commercialisation.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Got it. And tell us about the mobile phone manufacturing part, which is, of course, distinct from this and the announcement has come at the same time. So, what is the significance of that?

Nikit Popli: See, under both the scheme, the government right now is not only looking at scale, they're looking at depth, like I said. Even in the mobile phone manufacturing scheme, there was an earlier scheme for large-scale electronics manufacturing, which got expired on 31st of March, 2026. And now this has come at an extension.

Now, under this scheme, it is not merely assembly of mobile phones that India is looking at. Most of the mobile phones now used domestically are Indian-manufactured, right? But it is not merely the assembly that the government is looking at.

Now, what they are saying is, we'll give you a base subsidy on your turnover. You will get a top-up if your product is domestically, if you have components domestically procured, you get a top-up. If your product is Indian brand, if your product has Indian R&D, then you get an additional top-up.

So, the base of 2.25 can go up to 5-6% if it is an entirely indigenous product. So, the value addition or the depth is what the government is looking at.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. If I can just come back to the overall ecosystem now for semiconductors and mobile phones, who are the biggest investors? I mean, if not by name, what is that pipeline looking like?

And how much of it is likely to be domestic and overseas? For semiconductor, it is different.

Nikit Popli: See, in semiconductor, there is also a technology partnership which has to come mostly from outside of India, right? So, you will see many players having a technology partners coming out from outside of India. So, it's a mixed bag.

You will see domestic players partnering with an international brand and coming up there. My guess is that government is not focussing on the scale of investment or the amount of investment there. The focus is to have Indian manufactured chips so that the dependability on the foreign sources goes down or the import substitution happens.

On the mobile phone, the story is very, very different. Mobile phones, we already are manufacturing. There are the global mobile phone brand owners and then there are Indian EMS players or the Indian mobile phone manufacturers.

Now, this scheme kind of benefits both of them. The Indian EMS players would have a cost advantage because they get this subsidy because they are the real manufacturers of it. The global brand owners would get this benefit indirectly from being passed on by the Indian EMS players.

Plus, there are certain brand owners who are doing this manufacturing themselves, right? The government has not given a figure for the investment but they have said that about 39 lakh crore turnover they are expecting to be generated from the mobile phone manufacturing scheme being rolled out, right? So, that is the scale that the government is looking at.

And the subsidy that comes will be a percentage of turnover, like I said. The government is wanting larger turnover or larger scale rather than the investment itself.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. Thank you so much for joining me.

Nikit Popli: Thank you.

Consumers and Agentic AI

A McKinsey report released last week defined agentic commerce shopping powered by AI agents acting on our behalf as representing a seismic shift in the marketplace moving us towards a world in which AI anticipates consumer needs, navigates shopping options, negotiates deals and executes transactions all in alignment with human intent yet acting independently via a multi-step chain of actions enabled by reasoning models. Now this is not just an evolution of e-commerce the report said it's a rethinking of shopping itself in which the boundaries between platform services and experiences give way to an integrated intent driven flow through highly personalised consumer journeys that deliver a fast frictionless outcome.

So where are we in that journey here and how could that influence our own shopping trends online in India? I spoke to Shubh Bhaumik, co-founder and CEO of data science solutions company Tredence which works with companies in this journey and I began by asking him where we stood right now.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Shub Bhowmick: So, obviously there is a change. More often than not, we don't go to Google anymore to search for something new. We usually go to a ChatGPT or a Gemini or a Cloud.

In fact, I can give you one example. I was in New York about three weeks back. I had a meeting in the Metropolitan Club there, and I wasn't aware of the dress code, so I just showed up.

And thankfully, I showed up about an hour ahead of the meeting, and I realized that I was supposed to be in business forms, and I wasn't. So, I went to ChatGPT quickly. Here's how it's going to be different, right?

And it's already starting to be different. ChatGPT already knows who I am, what kind of stuff I like to buy, what my job is. Most likely, you know, was it a work meeting or a personal meeting and so on.

That context I provided, and immediately it proposed to me within five minutes a few options where I could just go and specifically what kind of gear I could pick up. And, you know, I actually, after I went to one of the two options that ChatGPT proposed, I bought a few things, and after I put them on, I took a picture, it judged me, and it told me what made sense. And within 15-20 minutes, I was done with the purchase, and I was able to come back to the meeting on time, right?

And of course, this is not an e-commerce example. This is still a situation where I physically went to the store. But these are the new themes, right?

These are the new themes where this experience is evolving. What did we do in the past, Govind? You know, we would go to Amazon to search for a product.

We would go to Google to start sometimes the discovery process. Or maybe we will go to a social media site to learn or build a perception about a brand and so on, right? Going forward, these things will most likely all converge into one of the chat agents, right?

Agent AI agents, chat bots. But, you know, having said that, I also feel if it's a commodity product, right, for example, I'm looking to buy diapers, I'm looking to buy toothpaste, then these are situations where I'm looking for convenience, right? I want to do that quickly.

And I don't have the time to definitely go to the store. Since I'm in Bangalore right now, I'm getting used to Zepto, and it's phenomenal, the 7-10 minute delivery options. But having said that, I still have to go and make the purchase.

I would like these future agent solutions, commerce solutions to remember all these things about me, because agents are much better than human beings in memory, in remembering things, right? And I want them to quickly make the purchase. If it's more an experience or a premium product that I'm looking to purchase.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Yeah. So now tell us, as people start using more of this for commerce, what needs to happen on the back and front end to enable it, particularly on the payments and related digital infrastructure?

Shub Bhowmick: Yeah. So from a retailer point of view, in fact, as a company that does a lot of work for retailers, we work very closely with them. And there are certain kinds of things that we are regularly doing, right, to enable their agent e-commerce infrastructure, right?

So one is, of course, the conversation that you're having with the buyer, it's more chatbot based, it's more conversational, where the shopper may share his or her intent, right? For example, I'm going to attend a wedding in Udaipur in the month of October, you know, this is what I'm looking for, right? So the chatbot then has to interact with the shopper and propose the right options and make the experience elegant, and eventually nudge him or her into a few options that, you know, drives the actual purchase.

But I'm also noticing one fangoven where the emphasis is not just on the chatbot, right? It's also about the back-end infrastructure, right? Making sure that the product ad catalog and the data around the product catalog is well structured, the reviews that are being posted are high, and so on and so forth.

So there is a lot more emphasis on products, the data about those products, the information that you are sharing with the shoppers, or the agents in this case about the product, because trust is important, you know, trust continues to be a very important thing. But now you're not just building trust with the human, but you're also building trust with the agent, right? And if I may say so, humans can sometimes be a little bit more forgiving when it comes to building trust, but agents are not.

You cannot get it wrong. So we are doing a lot of work in fixing the data infrastructures, rebuilding some of those data estates, so that when the agent is, you know, interacting with those retailers and their data infrastructures, the data is accurate.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right, so I think that sort of highlights a pain point, I guess, in itself and what has to be done about it. So if I were to take that forward and say, what are the two or three things that your clients are asking you to do right now, which enables them or helps them be ready for this world in response to what their customers are asking or likely to ask, what would that be?

Shub Bhowmick: Yeah, I would sort of double click on some of the things that I mentioned in my previous answer, right? It is about fixing the data foundation, right? Because if you don't have a strong data foundation, then your information will not be accurate.

It is about fixing some of those experience infrastructures, whether it's a chatbot or other mediums, which kind of is important in the value chain. It is about making sure that the fulfillment process is seamless from the shopper's perspective. It is about making sure that the actual payment process is seamless from an experience perspective, right?

Again, in some cases, you want the experience to be as seamless as possible, especially the commodity examples that I've mentioned, right? But in certain cases, let me think of another example. Let's say a travel example where you say, OK, I'm going to Singapore.

I prefer to stay in a Marriott and I intend to spend more than two lakhs a night or whatever the number may be. And these are the days that I'm traveling, right? You want the assistant to propose the right option based on the intent that you shared in natural language, right?

But to enable all these things from a backend perspective, because we don't just work with retailers, we actually also do a lot of work with hospitality companies. We do a lot of work with other industries, telecom companies, where our job is to not understand the intent of the question that is being asked by processing the natural language, converting that into the right language that the computer can understand, fire that into the data infrastructure that I mentioned, where we are helping our clients rebuild those data infrastructures. Once the response comes back, present that information in the most effective way to the client, right?

Because, you know, through this purchase, you also have to ensure that the shopper feels that it's still a highly personal experience. And it's not about talking to an agent or talking to a machine, which is pushing him or her into making a decision. Like I said, trust continues to be very important, but the agent is building trust with you.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Right. And what's the level, I mean, or the intensity of, let's say, activity that we are seeing right now? Again, you could answer this in the context of the clients that you're working with, in terms of preparedness for this world or these kind of consumers who are using, let's say, chatbots or rather agentic AI or LLMs to do all their searching and purchasing and so on.

Shub Bhowmick: I think we are still in the co-pilot phase of this. We are not yet in the autopilot phase yet. So we are doing a lot of work on, you know, these kind of chatbot type AI systems.

In fact, there's one healthcare client that we're working with, the supplement company, supplement retailer, where the patient can or the shopper can ask a question about a certain kind of situation that he or she is dealing with and what kind of supplements would make sense. So we would propose the right options. At first, give reason, then have a conversation over one or two turns, and then eventually propose a few options about what supplements may make sense or may not make sense.

Based on that, once the user clicks on an option, you still take him or her into the merchandiser's website, retailer's website, and then make the purchase experience as seamless as possible. So like I said, you are making the process easier. Instead of having to browse through 5,000 products, you are now shortlisting the choice down to three products.

You are trying to make sure that instead of making the shopper look through thousands of reviews, you're summarizing all of that into a few bullets. But the actual decision, the purchase, is still being made by the human, right? Having said that, I'm also starting to see certain shifts, right?

I will not be surprised if in the 6 to 12 months, a lot of these purchases will start becoming autonomous, right? You'll probably get a text message, some other notification, and so on.

Govindraj Ethiraj: Got it. Shub, it's been a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much for joining me.

Shub Bhowmick: Pleasure. Thank you.

China’s Kimi K3

Sticking to AI, Chinese AI pioneer Moonshot unveiled a new model that it claims performs on par with some of the top tier platforms from OpenAI and Anthropic BBC. The latest sign that China's artificial intelligence labs are closing a technology gap with the United States according to a Bloomberg report.

Moonshot released Kimi K3 on Friday touting benchmarks comparable to some of the US lab's best offerings. It is open weight meaning its parameters are available for users to download and customise and outperforms all rivals except Anthropic's Cloud Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 on overall capability it said. And here's the interesting part which also reflects once again the cutthroat competition within China in this case for AI models but also in areas like electric vehicles.

The competition often at unhealthy levels as described by regulators within the country has led to higher levels of innovation and market success. So Moonshot has claimed it surpasses local rival Z.AI's most advanced offering on coding tasks. The Bloomberg report says that if Kimi can undercut Anthropic and OpenAI particularly ahead of their planned initial public offerings this could append the business case for its rivals in the US and China.

Eye on Retail

On episode 4 of Eye on Retail, our series in partnership with Flipkart, I spoke with Jay Gullish of the US-India Business Council and Ashish Fafadia of Bloom Ventures to look at what India's next generation of e-commerce policy should look like. We also talk about whether current foreign direct investment rules remain fit for purpose, why regulatory consistency is critical for attracting long-term investment and how policy can strike the right balance between protecting small businesses and help them grow.

We also look at the role of digital public infrastructure, logistics, access to credit and formalisation in making Indian MSMEs more competitive. Here's an excerpt from that conversation.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Govindraj Ethiraj: So what is it that we can take away from those markets who may have addressed or faced similar concerns in this transition to more open marketplaces? That's one. And secondly, how does that path, if it's staggered in a way that allows everyone to, you know, find their feet, look like?

Jay Gullish: Yeah, I think what, thank you, that's a great question. One thing the United States does really well is it really leans into innovation via light touch, sort of lets the technology evolve, lets people sort of understand it, lets the culture and overall commerce kind of, you know, figure itself out and then sort of steps in. So and the way we often regulate is on principle based approaches and thinking about risk and really trying to think about light touch, but also periodically be willing to go and systematically cut regulations that no longer are appropriate.

Those are some of the few, I think, takeaways that India can learn from the United States. I think Singapore is also a great example. They take a very seasoned, mature approach to promoting new policies, whether it's data flows or cybersecurity or privacy.

And they think about it very coherently, starting with things like principles and moving to guidelines and going to checklists. And then only as the market becomes really mature, you start looking at things like standards and how you might assess those standards self internally or or if needed to have some sort of audit or compliance. You know, and I think, you know, one of the lessons I think from Europe that we can can learn is the European Union.

You know, while there are a lot of policy issues that emerge from the way they think about things, they do. They do allow some commonality across many different countries. We often think of the EU as a country.

It's not. And so it actually does make it easier to do business in the continent holistically through some sort of commonalities or standards or consistencies or reducing barriers. And so those are a couple of examples that I think India can take in.

What I would suggest, if if somebody were to ask me, is the commerce market is currently being regulated in a way that policymakers think of it as sort of an immature, a new technology when it actually has been around for a long time. I think there needs to be a holistic approach, top to bottom review of what what has worked, what has not worked. And I think the objectives should be principle based.

Look, if there's a problem with regulation, we go to the government of India. You know, typically they'll respond and fix those. It's all this view of what works and what doesn't, and maybe how the objectives have fundamentally changed now that there is a fair amount of infrastructure, cultural understanding, and then then actually just create opportunities for what we've been talking about kind of going forward.

Because there's a whole new wave of creativity and innovation coming down the pipeline. Social commerce, AI driven retail, live shopping. These are all starting to be things that are happening.

And yet India is still thinking about how to protect the corona from an inventory based platform. Right. So there's there's a lot of things that I think need to be rethought.

And rather than doing a piecemeal, I think a holistic review. The final thing I would say is I always like to say e-commerce is just commerce. It's just online and everything's online now.

There really isn't always a need to look at markets separately and independently, as as India often does. You have some baseline structures, whether it's consumer protection or or competition or fraud management that actually impact all aspects of the economy and don't necessarily need to be thought of in this sector and that sector. And that creates this almost matrix regulatory and compliance burden that is confounding to a lot of Indians, but also international investors.

And all of that compounding of regulation takes time, energy, money. It reduces margin. It creates headaches.

There's it's the rolling eye syndrome that when something pops up unexpected, you know, and it really impacts how people do think about India. And what I often say is, you know, I'd rather make money in Switzerland than lose money in India. And what I mean by that is and I've said this many, many years is it's all about the margin.

It's all about simplicity. It's about ease of doing business, about ease of investment decisions. Right.

And so while India's huge promise, there's huge complexity there. And so anything that can be done to simplify that, obviously, India is never going to be Switzerland. It's too big, too diverse.

But kind of find that middle ground, I think, would be very helpful. And finally, I think there needs to be a way to encourage people to get online. There's so to how to tap the fashionista that is doing something.

And we see a lot of this in sort of the social comment, social comments. So how do you how do you incent that? Is it is it through cultural pushes?

Is it taxation? Is it lower regulation? And I think the answer is yes to all above.

And to kind of integrate that into a rethink about how India wants to think about e-commerce in the next decade.

---

This episode will be out today on our YouTube channel so subscribe to the link in the description so you don't miss the release and see you next week.