After reading news of India’s first quarter GDP for FY 23, which showed little sign of a base effect despite the fact that in FY 22, we had grown 20.1% in the same quarter, we are likely to think that base effects don’t matter anymore. It would be unwise to think so, however, because this… Continue reading Pay Attention to the Cyclical Economy
From the time the Covid-19 pandemic broke at the start of 2020, people have been speculating about whether working from home will be the new normal. Even at the time of SARS in the late 1990s, there wasn’t such a fuss about how and where people worked from. Everyone just assumed that after the epidemic… Continue reading Returning to the Office and Why It Makes Sense
In my second Owleye column on my blog, I had called the geopolitical tensions emanating out of Russia and China at the time a red herring. I had written that the world, especially the media, were busy talking up the threat of war by Russia and China over Ukraine and Taiwan respectively. I was wrong.… Continue reading Geopolitical Tensions Derailing Economic Recovery
The Covid-19 pandemic hasn’t quite gone away yet and the global economy faces several headwinds going forward into the rest of this year and the next. Some of it is due to the hangover effects of the pandemic and others due to new challenges arising out of those. The main challenges to global economic growth… Continue reading After the Pandemic, the Rate Hike Stranglehold
In connection with my last blog post on brands in which I had written about how brands that take a long hiatus can make a comeback, I would now like to think and write about hugely successful brands that lose their way. Not that they disappear, just that they seem to be stuck in a… Continue reading Nothing Succeeds Like Success, Until You’re Lost
In my previous post on the Indian automobile industry, I had said that perhaps the time has come for the small, entry-level car in India to be reinvented. Runaway inflation in fuel prices as well as prices of vehicles have put these sub-compact and compact cars beyond the reach of ordinary, first-time car buyers in… Continue reading When Times Change, Technologies Change, But Brands Don’t
Regular readers of my blog probably know well by now that I don’t think the digital medium is suited to brand-building. At least not in its current form. I have written a few pieces on the subject already. And many might be wondering why I would even be remotely interested in writing about digital brands,… Continue reading Let’s Get Digital Brands Growing
In the fall of 2020, we were relieved to see a recovery in the sales of passenger vehicles in India, as people clearly showed a preference for owning their own private transport in the post-lockdown phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Companies were reporting better sales as the previous couple of years had seen a slowdown,… Continue reading Motown Caught Between Recovery and Slowdown
President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) plan for reviving ties with the Asia-Pacific region is a PR ploy to paper over large cracks in the region in the recent past. Right from the pivot to Asia announced by President Obama’s administration in 2009, which led to the creation of the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP)… Continue reading IFAFF Is What It All Amounts To
When reading newspapers or books or watching the news, we often come across the word development. It is a term so often used to mean growth, loosely speaking, that when attached to any other word, it takes on new meanings. Urban development, rural development, industrial development, sustainable development, etc. Then, of course, we have the… Continue reading Development and All That We Understand by It
