The Insight Labs Daily.

SBI Cards reported June-quarter profit up 20% to ₹664 crore on July 24. Card spends rose 27% to ₹1.18 lakh crore, and its share of all card spending widened to 19.5% from 16.6% a year earlier.

The unusual part is what happened to credit quality alongside that. Gross bad loans fell to 2.04% from 2.41% a quarter earlier, and net bad loans dropped to 0.83%. Rising spends and falling defaults rarely move together.

When they do, it signals a cycle turning. The stressed borrowers from the last two years have largely been written down, and the customers spending now are the ones the lender wants.

Dealer body FADA's registration data for July 1–23 shows retail vehicle sales up 28.6% over the same period last year. Two-wheelers rose 31%, passenger vehicles 20.6%, and tractors led at 36.8%.

Part of that is genuine. A softer interest-rate cycle and the GST cut on smaller vehicles have improved affordability, and new SUV launches are pulling buyers into showrooms.

Part of it is arithmetic. July 2025 was a washed-out month, so this July is measured against a low base. A 28.6% jump off a weak comparison is a smaller real gain than it reads.

InMobi appointed JPMorgan, Jefferies, Kotak and Axis this week for a roughly $1 billion IPO, targeting a valuation of $5–6 billion. The mobile-advertising company is shifting its domicile from Singapore to India ahead of the listing.

The redomicile is the real story. InMobi became India's first unicorn in 2011 under a Singapore holding structure; it is now relocating that structure back home specifically to list on Indian exchanges.

That reverses a decade of the opposite instinct, when startups flipped their parent entities offshore for easier foreign capital. The pull now runs the other way.

V-Mart Retail's June-quarter revenue rose 23% to ₹1,089 crore, reported July 24, with same-store sales up around 9% — its own stores over 8% and the Unlimited chain above 13%.

The same-store figure is what separates this from routine expansion. It measures shops open at least a year, so the growth came from existing stores selling more, not just a bigger footprint.

V-Mart sells value fashion in tier-2 and tier-3 towns. Discretionary apparel there is usually the last spending to recover, which makes an 9% same-store number an early signal, not a lagging one.

Baring Private Equity Partners India booked around ₹370 crore on a partial exit from battery-materials firm LOHUM on July 24, a return of more than 20 times its invested capital and an internal rate of return above 80%.

The size of the return is the signal. A 20x exit at 80% IRR is the kind of number that reprices how investors value the unglamorous end of the EV chain.

And that end is recycling and refining, not cell manufacturing. LOHUM recovers lithium, cobalt and nickel from spent batteries — the part of the supply chain that turns yesterday's packs into tomorrow's cathodes.