Paytm sold its 7.2% stake in PayPay to SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 for $279M net in December 2024, part of a broader divestment of non-core assets following the Reserve Bank of India’s crackdown on Paytm Payments Bank earlier that year.

Paytm held the stake not as equity but as Stock Acquisition Rights, and had to pay an exercise cost to convert those rights into actual shares before selling them, which reduced its net proceeds. The transaction valued PayPay at $7.06B (PDF). Fifteen months later, PayPay debuted on the Nasdaq at an opening market cap of $12.7B, putting the gross implied value of the same stake at $915M.

The value of gold held by Indian households nearly doubled in under a year, rising from $2.8 trillion in March 2025 to $4.8 trillion by January 2026. It now stands at 175% of the combined value of household deposits and equity.

This might not have much of an impact on consumption, however. Households earning under INR 500,000 annually hold nearly 70% of all household gold stock, and those households are unlikely to change spending or saving behaviour based on price appreciation alone, Kotak estimates.

Kotak modeled 20,000 quick commerce order baskets and found that more than half are priced below INR 500, a fat left tail driven by the fact that urban household spending puts a hard cap on how much quick commerce can expand. Only 52% of the consumption basket is addressable by quick commerce at all, the bank concluded.

The model’s central finding is that basket value is more sensitive to supplier pricing — specifically discounts to MRP — than to the number of items per order. Hence, the path to better unit economics runs through harder supplier negotiations rather than nudging customers to buy more.

HDFC Bank’s stock has fallen roughly 25% year-to-date and is trading at a price-to-book ratio of around 2×, the lowest level recorded since at least 1999.

An elevated loan-to-deposit ratio carried over from its merger with HDFC Limited, unexplained compression in loan yields, and stalling CASA market share gains despite the bank adding thousands of branches since FY22 have all weighed on investor confidence. Deposit growth and asset quality remain ahead of peers, but management has issued guidance across so many metrics simultaneously — loan growth, LDR, NIM, CASA — that investors have no single benchmark against which to measure a good quarter.

Food is India’s largest retail category at $600–640 billion, and e-commerce has barely touched it — just 1-2% penetration. Mobiles, at $40-45 billion, are a fraction of that size but nearly half already transact online, leaving the category most associated with Indian e-commerce the least room to grow.

UPI’s transaction volume growth has more than halved — from 82% in FY2023-24 to 42% in FY2024-25 — and is projected to slow further to 25% this fiscal year, prompting India’s parliamentary finance committee to question whether the world’s largest real-time payments network should continue to depend on government subsidies to stay solvent.

After nearly a decade of an unchallenged duopoly over India’s ride-hailing market, Uber and Ola now have fewer monthly active users combined than Rapido.

India’s logistics market has consolidated to the point where two delivery companies dominate supply and two e-commerce giants dominate demand. That tight structure keeps pricing rational — but the same consolidation that creates the opportunity also creates the fragility, as Shadowfax’s business hinges almost entirely on the strategic decisions of a handful of clients.

Monthly active users on merchant apps for Paytm and PhonePe have stagnated since late 2023, sitting at roughly 14 million and 15 million respectively, even as their combined registered merchant base reached ~47 million and is still growing at 10–15% annually.

Assuming ~75% of the combined installed device base of ~23 million are active, and an 80-90% overlap between the two platforms’ merchant bases, device penetration among registered merchants is already at 32-35%, Bernstein estimates.

Further reading:
Indian Payments’ Most Durable Revenue Line?
PhonePe’s $15 Billion IPO and the Cost of Building on Government Rails

Krafton’s PUBG was the most popular mobile game in India before the government banned it, and its return as Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) has not restored that dominance.

Indian developers account for fewer than seven of the top 100 mobile games by monthly active users in the country, according to India Dispatch’s analysis of Sensor Tower data.

The Indian-made games that do appear in the top 100 are Ludo King, Indian Bikes Driving 3D, Indian Vehicles Simulator, Indian Theft Aura Simulator, Ludo Supreme Gold King, WinZO, and Truck Masters — all board games or simulators themed around Indian roads and vehicles.

No Indian studio has a game in the top 100 in battle royale, puzzle, or runner categories, which remain dominated by Garena, King, Voodoo, and others.

Barring the Russia-Ukraine war, no geopolitical conflict in the past six years has dented the Nifty beyond a week — most recovered within two.

Ather’s market cap today: $2.95 billion. Ather’s valuation in private markets three years ago: $426 million.

Introducing Charted, a new newsletter from India Dispatch that picks one chart and unpacks what it tells you about India’s economy, markets and policy. Four to five times a week.

An investment bank used these projections to successfully sell the deal to a bank’s wealthy clients.

The only Indian apps in the top 20 are PhonePe at #11 with 167 million daily active users and JioHotstar at #18 with 94 million.

Indian apps make up 35 of the top 100 and 123 of the top 300. In comparison, 44 US apps in the top 100, 74 in the top 300.

Introducing Charted, a new newsletter from India Dispatch that picks one chart and unpacks what it tells you about India’s economy, markets and policy. Four to five times a week.

Large-caps were hit hardest, where foreign ownership dropped to its lowest point in a decade, even as mid- and small-cap holdings remained comparatively resilient.

Introducing Charted, a new newsletter from India Dispatch that picks one chart and unpacks what it tells you about India’s economy, markets and policy. Four to five times a week.