New Delhi: US and Israel’s war with Iran is already “putting India’s $6bn bottled water industry under strain as manufacturers struggle to access crucial raw materials,” Cherylann Mollan writes for the BBC, pointing to the looming Indian summer.
Reporting on the effects of a choked Strait of Hormuz beyond cooking gas, Mollan cites experts’ concern that the “crucial commodity” could soon become “prohibitively expensive”.
She cites a study by Data for India, which states that around 15 percent of urban households and 6 percent of rural households in India depend on bottled water for their drinking needs.
Vijaysinh Dubbal, president of the Maharashtra Bottled Water Manufacturers Association, told the BBC that plastic water bottles have become more expensive due to increasing oil prices, with a barrel of brent crude oil briefly hitting $119 this week.
“Crude oil is used to make Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) resin pellets—granules that are heated and passed through moulds to create PET preforms. These preforms, which look like plastic test tubes, are sold to brands and bottle manufacturers to be shaped into plastic bottles of the desired shape and size.”
Dubbal said the cost of preforms has increased from Rs 115 per kg to Rs 180 per kg, and there is a supply shortage. While some companies are absorbing the increased cost for now, if the war continues for long, customers could “face the heat”.
“Makers of glass bottles too are bearing the brunt of the war” and prices have surged.
Mollan reports that last month, the Brewers Association of India, which represents global brewers such as Heineken and Carlsberg, told Reuters that glass bottle prices have risen about 20 percent. It has asked member companies to seek 12-15 percent increase in beer prices from state governments, as alcohol pricing is regulated differently.
“Natural gas is used by glass manufacturers to run their furnaces, which melt sand, soda ash, limestone and recycled glass into molten glass blobs which are then shaped into bottles,” the report explains.
In Financial Times, Krishn Kaushik reports on new IndiGo CEO Willie Walsh’s “rare” appointment.
“Sundar Pichai at Alphabet, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Arvind Krishna at IBM, Leena Nair at Chanel and Ajay Banga at the World Bank are high-profile cases of Indian talent running the world’s biggest companies,” says the report titled ‘Willie Walsh is that rarity in India—a foreign chief executive’.
Kaushik writes that among 3,114 chief executives and managing directors at companies listed on the National Stock Exchange, only 39 are foreign nationals. And Walsh is next to join this exclusive club.
“But management experts said Walsh makes sense given the state of India’s aviation market—a duopoly that is still heavily influenced by government regulation.”
Walsh, the former boss of British Airways, will replace Pieter Elbers, a Dutch national who had previously led his country’s flag carrier KLM, the report notes.
Air India is also headed by a foreign national, and experts say that it “makes sense” given India’s aviation market.
The report highlights the difference between the aviation sector and other industries in India: “The price points in India, the dynamism of the market, the diversity across Indian states and the different mindset of consumers make it challenging for an outsider.”
Markets have also reacted positively to Walsh’s appointment, with shares in InterGlobe Aviation, IndiGo’s parent company, rising by 6 percent.
“Over the past three years, IndiGo and Air India have placed orders for more than 1,000 aircraft. As IndiGo grows from a 400-aircraft carrier to a fleet of 900-1,000 over the next decade, Walsh will have to manage the growing complexity of its operations,” says the report.
In The New York Times, Alisha Haridasani Gupta traces pop culture rapper Hanumankind’s success, “from a desk job in India to rap stardom”.
Sooraj Cherukat, “a former Goldman Sachs operations analyst who discovered rap as a child in South Texas and is better known by his stage name, Hanumankind, started bobbing with the audience with what seemed to be the stamina of an inflatable tube man”.
The report states that Cherukat’s music “merges hip-hop beats with the anthemic rhythms of Indian religious and cultural ceremonies, and he throws out lines about colonialism, racism and the immigrant experience in English, with an American twang”.
In the summer of 2024, he released the thumping hit Big Dawgs, which climbed Billboard’s US charts and Spotify’s Global Top 50.
On TikTok, Big Dawgs became the soundtrack for more than a million videos, while on YouTube, its video has crossed 280 million views.
“At a time when global music charts are increasingly populated by songs from everywhere—South Korea to Nigeria and Puerto Rico—Hanumankind’s success reflects how capriciously artists, many of whom release singles independently online, can jump from relative obscurity to global stardom and then, naturally, into the world of the corporate jingle,” Gupta writes.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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