Monetrix

Not many years ago, people used to hoard delivery menus in their drawers and call up restaurants for ordering food, only to wait for 60-90 minutes before their food would get delivered.  Surprisingly, it was only 5-6 years ago. Ordering food online is now so convenient and affordable that a lot of people in India are doing it almost every day. Delivery boys wearing different uniforms are now seen in every corner of the city, rushing to complete their deliveries. And although both Swiggy and Zomato are associated with food delivery, it is interesting to explore how different their business plans and strategies are. Both these companies have consistently been loss-making. While Swiggy made losses amounting to 2300 crores, Zomato posted losses of approximately 1000 crores in FY21. However, both of them have similar revenue numbers. But perhaps, what would be interesting to see is how they see their respective futures. Let’s start with the analysis of Zomato. It’s trying to be a one-fo...

Earlier this year, it appeared that the chip scarcity will be alleviated by 2022. Now, that forecast appears to have been optimistic. It is becoming clear that this crisis is going to last for some more years and the snarls in the semiconductor supply chain are weighing not only on the Indian economy but also on the global economy. Even after a year into this global chip crisis, the problems are only increasing for the final consumers and the allied industries as the wait-time is constantly rising and has reached almost 25 weeks in October. (Generally, wait time of 8-9 weeks is considered a healthy one) What caused the shortage? The semiconductor industry was one of the businesses hardest hit by the trade war, and the problems only got worse when global supply networks were disrupted by the epidemic. Multiple times in 2020 and 2021, Malaysia, one of the world's top semiconductor suppliers, was placed under a severe lockdown. Similarly, TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductors Manufacturing Corp...

You may have heard that the first tweet of the Twitter CEO is getting sold! Or digital art is sold for $69 Million, and you must surely be wondering about what the craze is about. All this is possible due to the weird, yet emerging technology called Non-Fungible Tokens. NFT has gained massive popularity in recent times and is becoming quite popular in the cryptocurrency world. In this article, we will understand the growing hype of NFTs among people and how can people buy something like a ‘tweet’. What is NFT? NFTs are unique assets that can’t be interchanged with something else and are stored and verified with the use of blockchain technology. In other words, we can trade one cryptocurrency for another, which makes them fungible. But NFTs cannot be replaced with one another for similar items. They include almost everything from music, pictures to a website domain, but the recent trend has been around digital artwork. Now, you surely must be thinking that if anyone can record these fil...

  The Paris Climate Summit in 2015 was a landmark event, while the material impact might be debatable but the promises and hopes that were sold in its aftermath were meant to change the future, save the world. While unsurprisingly, some governments changed, forests continued to burn & promises were forgotten, the recent news surrounding coal shortages and natural gas crisis across Eurasia sounded like a bad joke, especially when a global conference on climate change is just around the corner, talk about timing! The event we are alluding to is the COP26 – the 26 th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. This conference is valuable because it is the most important global platform for talks on Climate Change among the world leaders after the 2015 Paris Summit. While the deal did not demand or declare austerity or cuts on spending, the signatories pledged their own Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) strategies but the deal required them t...

The last five decades have been a true reflection of the very famous saying by Dean Kamen ‘Every once in a while, a new technology, an old problem, and a big idea turn into an innovation’; and one of the more recent examples of such innovation is ‘electronic vehicles.’ With the rising environmental and sustainability concerns across the globe, significantly due to the excessive usage of vehicles running on internal combustion, the idea of electric vehicles has gained the momentum of a separate industry on its own. In India too, the buzz is growing with each passing day. At this juncture, it would be important understand to delve deeper, to have an insight into the Electronic Vehicles’ (EV) Industry in India and the major factors that modulate the same. To begin with, to understand the overview and the potential of the EV industry as a whole, we need to answer two significant questions – First, ‘Are the external conditions conducive enough for this sector to grow?’ The majority of the c...

With technology encroaching almost all facets of our life, the emergence of a form of banking system operating without a physical infrastructure hardly comes as a surprise. This model is currently being used by neobanks or new-age banks. The names of established players in this segment like Razorpay, FamPay, Fi, etc. have become quite commonplace. So what exactly has led to them taking the industry by storm in the last five years? I believe the regulatory environment and the additional layers of functionality offered have made them a phenomenon. Neobanks don’t need to obtain licenses. All that is required for them is to partner with a traditional bank already having a license. Neobanks were able to come up with solutions to problems that have been prevalent in the banking industry for a long. One such problem was the high cost of international transfers and neobanks have come up with low-cost solutions for the same. The age of big data and analytics help these banks t...