What are India’s startups doing today? They are focused on food delivery apps turning unemployed youth into cheap labour. Do Indian startups need to learn from their Chinese counterparts? The top business headline from India this week – Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal has exhorted Indian startups to think big.
Speaking at the Startup Maha Kumbh, the minister underlined the lack of deep tech startups in India, drawing a comparison with their Chinese counterparts. What do Chinese startups do… Are we the best in the world? Not yet. Commerce Minister there on the roadmap for Indian startups.
And talking of commerce, here’s the big global story of the week. US President Donald Trump has called his reciprocal tariff move an operation that was needed to fix the ailing US economy. It was a sick patient. It went through an operation on Liberation Day. And it's going to be a booming country.
The statement comes a day after Trump announced reciprocal—or tit-for-tat—tariffs on imports, introducing a baseline 10 per cent duty on all goods entering the US, and higher rates for over sixty countries that run trade surpluses with the US. As part of this move, the Trump administration has also imposed a 26 per cent duty on Indian goods. While Trump reiterated that Prime Minister Modi was a “great friend,” he also criticised India for levying a 52 per cent tariff on American imports.
India’s Commerce Ministry responded to the US tariff, saying that it was reviewing the fine print of the tariff order to assess the overall impact. However, an official quoted by news agency PTI called the outcome a “mixed bag,” and added that India was better placed than many other countries.
In response to Trump’s tariff announcements, global markets witnessed a meltdown, with the US markets seeing the sharpest cuts in five years. The Dow, and S&P 500 were down over four percent each on Thursday. The technology-heavy Nasdaq tanked six per cent. This as some of the biggest American multinationals like Apple, Amazon, and Tesla saw cuts of up to ten percent each during Thursday's session.
Back home as well, Indian equity markets ended the week lower. Both the Sensex and the Nifty closed in the red. IT stocks experienced some of the sharpest declines due to concerns over the tariff impact. Pharma stocks, which had gained on Thursday after the US did not announce tariffs for the sector, plummeted on Friday.
This followed President Trump’s clarification that his administration would announce pharma tariffs separately. And that’s a wrap for this edition of our weekly Business News Wrap. We’ll be back with more next Friday.
