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★ Lead Story

1 day ago · 2 min read

HUL is raising its investment to 3% of sales in the week its stock hit a 52-week low

On Friday, September 4, Hindustan Unilever filed its Capital Markets Day presentation with the exchanges. The number that matters: productive capital expenditure goes to 3% of turnover, from the roughly 2% it has averaged for five years. On FY26 turnover of Rs 63,763 crore, that is about Rs 1,900 crore a year against about Rs 1,275 crore, an extra Rs 640 crore or so every year.

Where it goes is the real disclosure. HUL named male grooming, masstige skincare, fragrances, vitamins and minerals, healthy snacking, protein, hydration, ready-to-drink and functional deodorants as the categories it will enter or build. Premium brands already get twice the investment of the rest of the portfolio, and the plan is to grow the most profitable premium lines 50% faster than the everyday core.

The money is meant to come from inside. HUL set a target of 500 basis points of savings to reinvest, cost reductions one percentage point above its historical rate, and a claim that AI will lift media effectiveness by more than 10%.

The timing explains the tone. Revenue in the April to June quarter rose 10% to Rs 17,341 crore, the fastest in 13 quarters, but EBITDA margin slipped 40 basis points to 23%. The stock touched a 52-week low this week and is down 26% over a year against a 3.2% fall in the Nifty 50.

So the company that built Indian FMCG on soap, detergent and tea is answering a falling share price by spending more, in categories where it is the challenger. The question is whether distribution and a cheque book can buy positions that D2C brands built on a fraction of HUL's cost base.

The portfolio has already been moving in this direction. HUL sold Pureit, demerged its ice cream business and divested Nutritionalab, and bought Oziva in plant nutrition and Minimalist in science-led skincare. Read the new category list next to the D2C funding tables of 2021 to 2024 and it is almost the same list: protein, hydration, masstige skincare, men's grooming. HUL is entering where venture money proved the demand.

Who this reaches: modern trade and quick commerce, which is where these categories sell, get a larger HUL budget; the rural mass core gets a smaller share of each incremental rupee, even as HUL repeats that growth will be volume-led. Independent brands in those nine categories now face HUL's reach with HUL's spending behind it.

The risk is the margin line. Capex up, premium advertising doubled, and a savings target above anything HUL has delivered before. If the volume does not arrive, a 40 basis point slip in one quarter becomes a trend, and the market has already shown this week what it thinks of that.

Today's Top 5

5 stories

Policy · 1 day ago

Foreign-owned e-commerce can now own inventory in India, as long as every unit leaves the country

On September 2, the Department of Economic Affairs amended the FEMA non-debt instrument rules to let e-commerce entities with foreign investment run an inventory-based model exclusively for exports. The notification, reported on September 4, gives legal effect to a policy decision announced in July. The ban on foreign-funded inventory e-commerce for Indian customers is unchanged.

The conditions are specific. Goods must be made or produced in India, exported under the Foreign Trade Policy 2023, and the proceeds realised and reported under FEMA export rules. Compliance is checked transaction by transaction.

Amazon and Flipkart have asked for the inventory model for a decade and been refused every time to protect kirana and domestic sellers. The government has now given it to them with one word attached: export. The platform becomes a buyer from small Indian factories and a shipper to the world, and the question is how long the export warehouse and the domestic warehouse stay separate buildings.

What changes on the ground: a platform can buy stock from an MSME, hold it in its own name, and sell it abroad through its own storefronts. The Indian manufacturer stops being a seller managing listings and becomes a supplier with a purchase order. For a small maker without an export licence or a foreign bank account, that is the whole barrier removed.

Who loses: the export aggregators and merchant exporters who sat between small factories and Amazon Global. Who is watching: domestic sellers, because the same warehouse, the same staff and the same software will now handle owned inventory a few metres from marketplace inventory, and enforcement rests on paperwork.

Meesho · 1 day ago

SoftBank sold Rs 1,650 crore of Meesho, and the buyers were fund managers and pension money

On September 4, SoftBank's SVF II Meerkat sold 8 crore Meesho shares, a 1.7% stake, in two tranches at a weighted price of Rs 206.30, a 1.6% discount to the previous close, for Rs 1,650 crore. The buyers, per NSE data, were Franklin Templeton (96.7 lakh shares), Societe Generale (80 lakh), Fidelity (66.7 lakh), Manulife (50.3 lakh), plus HDFC Life, Goldman Sachs, Motilal Oswal, Morgan Stanley, HSBC Mutual Fund and the sovereign funds of Kuwait, Oman and Norway.

It is the latest in a queue. Y Combinator sold Rs 969.6 crore last week, Elevation Capital and Peak XV Rs 974.6 crore each a few weeks earlier, and Fidelity Rs 988 crore in June the day after lock-in expiry. SoftBank still held 8.6% at the end of June. The stock closed Friday at Rs 209.74, down 0.88% on the day, and is up about 40% over six months.

Roughly Rs 5,500 crore of venture-era stock has changed hands since June and the price went up. That is the point of the story: the register is being rebuilt from early investors who need exits into institutions that will judge Meesho on quarterly profit, which was a loss of Rs 132.8 crore in the June quarter, 54% smaller than a year ago, on revenue up 48% to Rs 3,707 crore. What does the stock do when the sellers run out?

SoftBank has been harvesting its Indian listings in the same window: it trimmed Lenskart and cut its Delhivery stake from 9.67% in September 2024 to 7.61% by June 2026. The Vision Fund's India book is being converted to cash while the buyers are there.

The caveat is what the new owners want. Venture funds tolerated Rs 11,614 crore of quarterly merchandise value and 27.4 crore annual users as the score. Mutual funds and insurers will ask when the Rs 132.8 crore loss becomes a profit, and the answer decides whether the discount on the next block is 1.6% or larger.

Electric Vehicles · 2 days ago

EV registrations fell 10% in August, and lost share in both two-wheelers and cars

Vahan data compiled by EVreporter on September 3 shows 2,98,048 electric vehicles registered in August against 3,32,274 in July, a fall of 10.3%. Electric two-wheelers dropped to 1,83,077 from 2,05,640, electric cars to 30,424 from 34,512, and e-rickshaws to 28,811 from 34,718. Only electric buses (908 from 575) and electric goods carriers (3,773 from 3,057) rose.

The share numbers are the harder part. EV penetration in two-wheelers slipped to 10.7% from 11.2%, and in passenger cars to 7.6% from 8.1%. TVS, Bajaj and Ather led electric two-wheelers; Tata Motors held over 43% of electric cars. The twelve months to August still add up to 30.7 lakh EVs, with July the peak month.

August is when dealers stock up for the festive quarter, and the overall vehicle market grew in the month. So EVs did not just sell fewer; they took a smaller slice of a growing pie. Is that a price gap, a financing gap, or buyers waiting for the cheaper scooters and cells that were announced this month?

A single month after a peak is not a trend, and September's festive registrations will be the real test. But two-wheeler and car penetration moved in the same direction at the same time, which is what a demand signal looks like rather than a supply hiccup.

Who is exposed: makers that only sell electric, whose entire volume moved with the category, against TVS and Bajaj, which now lead electric two-wheelers while their petrol lines carry the month. The Vahan count excludes low-speed two-wheelers and covers 1,467 of 1,469 RTOs, so the numbers can move a little on revision.

Comet · 1 day ago

A three-year-old sneaker brand with four models raised Rs 100 crore to open stores

On September 4, Bengaluru sneaker brand Comet closed a Rs 100 crore Series B led by Verlinvest, the Belgian consumer investor behind Sula and Epigamia in India, with Elevation Capital and Nexus Venture Partners adding money. Angels included Urban Company co-founder Abhiraj Singh Bhal, Snap's Ajit Mohan and Bhaane founder Anand Ahuja.

The plan is physical. Comet, founded in 2023, sells four shoe models and expects eight by the end of 2027. It expects 10 stores by this month and 20 by the end of FY27. Its co-founder said the stores outperform the wider athleisure category in every market they operate in, which is why the round goes to rollout, technology and product development.

Sneakers in India are Nike, Adidas and Puma at the top and Campus and Bata at volume. A Rs 100 crore cheque for a brand with four products is a bet that fit, trial and a store you can walk into beat a listing. The question is which runs out first: models to fill the shelves or footfall to justify them.

Why stores matter more for shoes than for most D2C categories: sizing returns are the hidden cost of selling footwear online, and a store converts the return into a try-on. Every rupee saved on reverse logistics is margin that a listing-led brand never sees.

The caveat is scale. Rs 100 crore is a season's marketing for a global sportswear brand in India, and Comet has not disclosed revenue. Twenty stores by FY27 is a Bengaluru-Mumbai-Delhi footprint, which makes this a premium-city brand for now, whatever the funding headline says.

Swiggy · 1 day ago

Swiggy's concierge spent a year taking every request, and has narrowed to one: travel

On September 4, Swiggy relaunched Crew, its paid concierge service, as a travel concierge: flights, hotels, cabs, visas, foreign exchange, reservations and 24-hour help across time zones, delivered by human agents working with AI. It is live for paying members and invited travellers only. After a year as a general-purpose concierge, Swiggy said travel produced the strongest demand for end-to-end help.

Rohit Kapoor, who runs Swiggy's food marketplace, framed the gap as the space between making a booking and living the trip: itinerary changes, a missed connection, a restaurant that needs to be rebooked at midnight. Online travel agencies sell the booking and leave. Crew is trying to sell what happens after.

This is a low-margin delivery company building a high-touch, paid layer for its top slice of users, using the data it already has on how they spend. The unknown is the number that matters: how many of Swiggy's users will pay a person when the apps are free?

Why travel and not everything: it has the highest ticket size, the most points of failure and the clearest willingness to pay when something goes wrong. The concierge model is as old as the premium credit card; what is new is attaching it to a food app that already knows where you eat and how often you order.

The caveat is that humans do not scale like dark stores. Swiggy has not disclosed pricing, member numbers or agent headcount, and every concierge business before it has found that the customers who pay most are also the ones who need the most. Whether the AI layer changes that arithmetic is the test.

⚡ 30-Second Scan

Furlenco's profit rose nearly 20-fold to Rs 59.5 crore in FY26: revenue grew 62% to Rs 370.4 crore and EBITDA margin widened to 35%, filed the same week rival RentoMojo priced its IPO, so furniture rental now has two profitable operators (BW Retail World).

NEXT opened its first Mumbai store at Infiniti Mall, Malad: the British mid-price fashion chain is adding Indian stores as global apparel brands chase the same handful of malls (BW Retail World).

Decathlon has put 500-plus kids' sports products on FirstCry: apparel, footwear and equipment, with the French retailer renting a parenting platform's audience rather than building a children's aisle in its own big-box stores (BW Retail World).

Sourced from public reporting; analysis by The Insight Labs.

Sources: BW Retail World, HUL Capital Markets Day filing, DEA notification, September 2, Inc42, NSE bulk deal data, EVreporter, Vahan Dashboard, company statement.

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