&w=3840&q=100)
WTC final is most-watched non-India Test on digital platform: JioStar CEO
In an interview with Variety, Gupta attributed the digital milestone to a well-timed cross-promotional strategy executed during IPL 2025. 'We didn't drop the full show at one go, but actually staggered it starting during the IPL,' he said, underscoring how JioStar leveraged the cricketing frenzy to create anticipation around the WTC final.
$500 Million Investment in Sports Offerings
As the Indian sports economy gears up to become a $130 billion industry by 2030, as projected by the Think Sports report by Google and Deloitte, JioStar is significantly scaling up its investments. Gupta revealed that the company is committing $500 million across production, marketing, and technology to deepen its presence in the live sports space.
'Our journey actually begins at that point [of rights acquisition] to grow fans for the property, to deepen fandom for that property, and to be able to extract disproportionate value from that property,' he noted.
From cricket to coldplay: A broad sports vision
Beyond cricket, JioStar's ambitions span diverse entertainment avenues. Reflecting on the platform's first major live event—Coldplay's concert at the Narendra Modi Stadium on January 26—Gupta called it a 'cultural zeitgeist moment.' The concert, held on India's Republic Day, symbolised the fusion of global music and national pride.
Gupta further outlined a broader vision for the platform: to transform India into a sporting nation. 'Our mission is to serve one fan as many sports experiences as possible, powered by the interplay of technology and creativity,' he said, hinting at JioStar's long-term strategy of integrating immersive fan engagement with premium content.
A Strategy Anchored in Fan Value
Gupta reiterated that JioStar's investments in sports properties are guided by a four-point thesis centered on reach, engagement, monetization, and fandom. 'Till such time as sports, sporting properties, sports rights, continue to deliver on these four tenets of the investment thesis, we will continue to invest in them,' he asserted.
With viewership benchmarks being redefined and technology playing a critical role in content delivery, JioStar aims to remain at the forefront of India's booming sports and live entertainment economy.
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Economic Times
24 minutes ago
- Economic Times
Indian biscuits, shampoos & poha go global: FMCG exports outpace domestic sales for HUL, Dabur and others
Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Popular in Cons. Products Kolkata: Smartphones may have sizzled their way to become the country's largest exported goods in the last fiscal year, but Indiamade daily use consumer goods such as biscuits, noodles, packaged gram flour, soaps and shampoos are also rapidly making inroads into global shelves. Top fast-moving consumer goods companies like Hindustan Unilever (HUL), ITC Dabur and AWL Agri Business (formerly Adani Wilmar) have reported faster growth in their export revenue compared with local sales in the past two fiscal international business accounts for only 3% of the turnover for some like HUL due to their very large domestic operations, it brings more than 20% of the revenue for companies such as Dabur, Emami and Marico. Unilever India Exports Ltd, HUL's wholly owned subsidiary for exports to other Unilever companies globally, posted an 8% increase in sales at Rs 1,258 crore in the last financial year ended March 31, according to HUL's annual report. Its net profit rose 14% to Rs 91 total sales, meanwhile, grew at a tepid pace of 2%, weighed by weak domestic company attributed the export growth to products in skin care, lifestyle nutrition, hair care and personal wash, driven by brands like Dove, Horlicks, Vaseline, Pears, Bru, Sunsilk, Glow and Lovely, Pond's, Lakme and Lifebuoy. It's not just basmati rice, traditionally a top commodity for exports from India, which is in high demand, said Angshu Mallick, chief executive at AWL Agri Business, India's largest packaged edible oil company. Mustard and sunflower oil, atta, besan (gram flour), soya nuggets and poha (flattened rice) all are seeing strong demand in foreign markets, he said.'We are just scratching the surface. The proliferation of Indian restaurants and popularity of Indian cuisines in the West is driving the exports. And it's not just the Indian diaspora but even the local people (in foreign markets) are buying these,' said Mallick, predicting that exports could rise 50-80% this fiscal demand is strong, a push from the government through export-focussed programmes like production-linked incentive schemes (PLI) for the food processing industry and millet-based products are also helping boost shipments, industry executives said. The government in December said it had selected 73 companies for benefits under the PLI scheme for marketing Indianbranded food products in global said in its latest annual report that its branded export business grew threefold in the past three years to cross Rs 250 crore in FY25. Godrej Consumer Products said in an investor presentation that the operating margin of its international business expanded to 17% in FY25 from 10% two years told analysts recently that its export business is scaling up fast and it posted 14% growth in constant currency terms (excluding the impact of currency movements) in FY25, compared with overall growth of 12%. At Dabur, exports grew 17% against a 1.3% expansion in consolidated revenue. ITC Ltd said in its latest annual report that the company is seeing 'green shoots' in exports of biscuits, noodles and snacks while its Aashirvaad Atta is already the market leader in several countries. 'ITC is also exploring strategic opportunities in proximal markets as a potential vector of growth going forward,' it a bulk of ITC's foreign exchange earnings from export is still driven by agri-commodities export revenue rose 7% to Rs 7,708 crore in FY25 — its FMCG export is set to become the next growth driver. The firm said its FMCG products are now sold in over 70 countries. Exports of other consumer goods from apparel, jewellery and consumer electronics to automobiles have also grown last fiscal year.
Indian Express
26 minutes ago
- Indian Express
Chef Vijay Kumar, NYC's best chef, on how snails became his badge of honour
There was a time when a young boy growing up in Natham village, in Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu, would hide his school tiffin. He loved the stir-fried snail curry and the slivers of coconut to go with it, but the rich boys would make fun of him for eating something dug out from the soil, from under a rock or the giant coconut palm leaf squelched by the rain. 'Despite being the school topper, they judged me, belittled me because snails were considered no man's food, they shamed me… for years I carried that shame, fear and anxiety. Now that shame is my badge of honour. Look where the snails got me,' says a teary-eyed chef Vijay Kumar, who has just won the James Beard award for being the best chef in New York. Needless to say, much of the honour, regarded as the food Nobel of sorts, had to do with the chef's signature dish, Nathai PirattalI, the spicy, peppery snail curry from his childhood — humble, grounded, unabashed and unapologetic. The Michelin-starred restaurant, Semma, which he helms, means fantastic in Tamil. It keeps to the tiffin-house look with wooden tables and chairs, wicker lamps and ceilings. 'That's my truth and truth has no colour, it is bare, it will stand strong anywhere… provided you stick to it,' says the 43-year-old, who refuses to be invisibilised and has redefined the contours of the subaltern, upturning it even. 'The food I grew up on, the food made with care, with fire, with soul is now taking the main stage. There is no such thing as a poor person's food or a rich person's food. It's food. It's powerful. And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table,' he said in his winning speech, proudly wearing a veshti. Vijay's story came under the arclights after The New York Times named Semma as the best restaurant in its annual list of 100 best restaurants for 2025. This is the first time an Indian restaurant has topped the list. This is a metaphor at many levels. He is the quintessential immigrant, who has seized the American dream with his warm, toothy smile, turned the tide of scepticism with his flavours and tossed in his bit of history in a salad bowl. Eleven other immigrant chefs have also won the 'best chef' crown in their zones but Vijay has the heart of NYC. He may have been a societal castaway but has stormed Greenwich Village as its cultural stakeholder. He is the self-made Indian who couldn't afford Ivy League but has been on the grind to raise resources for himself and save up for his family back home. 'I have not been home for the last five years. My parents still live at Natham, my mother still doesn't know what this award means. All she understands is that her son is famous because neighbours and local TV channels have been visiting her. My sister and brother, both state government employees, try explaining but she never understands how the dishes she cooked at home would be such an asset for me,' says Vijay over a Zoom call. His office seems spartan and functional as he pores over the menu. On a typical night, about 1,000 people wait in queue for hours to get a table at the 65-seater restaurant. Reservations open at 7 am every 15 days but are booked by 12 noon. That doesn't stop the walk-ins. Vijay has an easy way of meeting the pressure of expectation, going out for a short drive in the woods hugging New York and listening to Ilaiyaraaja's songs from the '80s. These sensory experiences are from his childhood of which he doesn't have many photographs. 'Making ends meet, we did not have cameras to record our childhood except when we got photographed for IDs,' he says. Vijay grew up in a farmer's family. 'We didn't have big tracts of land, just enough to sustain ourselves. Our parents worked hard to give us an education. Like any kid from our time, I wanted to become an engineer or a doctor,' he says. He was a consistent topper at the Government Higher Secondary School. But scores were not enough to pursue the civil engineering course he wanted. 'In 1998, the course cost between Rs 1 and 2 lakh, which my parents could not afford. I ticked off my second-best skill — cooking. So, I went to the State Institute of Hotel Management and Catering Technology at Tiruchirapalli, where I graduated in 2001,' he says. For Vijay, cooking wasn't so much of a passion; instead it was a life skill. 'I have three other siblings and since my mother worked on a farm, all of us helped her in cooking and chores. But the way my mother rustled up a quick meal for us fascinated me,' he says. So strong is the memory that his mother's after-school snack, sprouted moong with spices (Mulaikattiya Thaniyam) and stir-fried seasonal vegetables (Uzhavar Santhai Poriyal) that grew on their farm are now part of Semma's menu. As are goat intestines or Kudal Varuval, something that the village butcher gave away for free and his mother made into a delicacy for her children. 'Offals were the best protein in our growing up years. A throwaway food is now New York's most wanted,' he says as he serves them with caramelised onions and coconut milk gravy, accompanied by a toddy-fermented dosa. So he never regrets the scarcity that he fought all his life. 'That was a blessing. It taught me not only to survive but think of life's possibilities.' But the real introduction to cooking was when his parents sent him over to his grandparents' during school holidays. 'They lived in a tiny village called Arasampatti near Madurai. We would be sent there to help them. This village had no electricity, no bus service and no roads till about 30 years ago. We had to walk at least 3-4 km on muddy tracks to reach their home. We woke up with the sun and went with our grandparents foraging for snails, hunting deer or fishing. Remember there was no market, no refrigeration, no store. My grandmother would cook fresh vegetables with home-ground spices and aromatics in a mud pot on an open fire pit in the middle of a paddy farm; you could feel the soil breathe. Then she would ladle out the snail curry in tamarind sauce and coconut on banana leaves. The seared venison meat was the perfect example of slow cooking,' he says. Assisting his mother and grandparents, Vijay developed a photographic memory of each stage of cooking. The culinary school just helped him understand the science of food. It was at culinary school that he was first taught about the French delicacy escargot, snails cooked in garlic butter. 'I was pleasantly surprised that a poor man's food in India was a delicacy in France,' says Vijay. That helped him shed his inhibitions about owning his kind of food. That confidence saw him work at Taj Connemara in Chennai, followed by a cruise ship, where he hated the monotony of an assembly line job that seldom allowed any creativity. 'But I had a family to take care of. Then my dad passed away and I came back to be with my family. That's when a friend offered me an opportunity to work in the US,' says Vijay. He worked at Dosa in San Francisco and then at Rasa in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he got his first Michelin star in 2016. Semma now has three. 'These were high volume restaurants, offering South Indian staples in a contemporary manner. But I was not happy cooking with artichokes, asparagus and California vegetables. I just wanted to cook like my mother and grandmother, have a kitchen where I could thrive and not debone the meat but let it melt and glide off the bone instead,' says Vijay, almost recreating his childhood kitchen with animated gestures. He had two choices: do his job, make money and help his family back home or follow his passion, risk his everything and stir up a revolution. It was at this juncture that he was introduced to Roni Mazumdar, CEO of Unapologetic Foods and his partner chef Chintan Pandya, himself a James Beard winner for best chef (2022). For the last few years, the two have been consistently changing the curry-house narrative of Indian cuisine, confined to chicken tikka masala, samosa chaats, saag paneer, gobhi masala and lassi. Nor are they pushing nouvelle cuisine. They are picking up Michelin stars simply because their Indian restaurants present regional cuisine at their purest. 'It is unfair to reduce the food democracy of India into 10-odd recognisable dishes, when we have tens and thousands of recipes to offer to the world. Even South Indian food itself is stereotyped by idli, dosa and sambar. We aren't the cult phenomenon that Italian, Chinese or Japanese cuisine has achieved,' says Vijay, whose underdog story convinced Mazumdar and Pandya that the simple farmer's food from the heart deserved an equal place at the high table. Vijay was hesitant at first. That old fear of being judged, derided and lampooned chipped away at his confidence in the run-up to Semma, which was started in 2021. But once New Yorkers sampled the robust flavours of the hearth, it jogged everybody's memory of where they had come from and the food they grew up with. 'Some guests cried, some blessed me, one of them gave me a little Ganesha statue for good luck. At that moment Semma was not just about food or my story, it became the pot of stories that had never been told by millions,' says Vijay. A confident New Yorker now, Vijay doesn't want to pander to Western sensibilities and taste. 'For far too long, we have bowed down to the preferences of others, tweaked our food to feel accepted and been ashamed to cook the food we would like to eat. Why do we shy away from our spices? They give our food character. Do you see any other cuisine humouring our palate? Will the Italians add more paprika for an Indian? Why then are we expected to do that?,' asks Vijay. He believes being real will always be appreciated and rewarded though he was once told that people might not be willing to pay for his kind of food. 'This is the biggest misconception Indians have. Authentic food will always be prized. Indian food has been overlooked for such a long time only because we are not being who we are. Even the hyperlocal can be global provided it tastes good,' says the chef who is now hoping to present the street food of Chennai and Hyderabad. Before that, there are some speed breakers he has to negotiate, particularly when the immigrant experience is being tested all across the US. Vijay, too, had a turbulent ride in between when two social influencers questioned the Michelin star for Semma, trolling its indigenous food, misspelling dishes and making culturally insensitive remarks. However, Vijay was unperturbed. 'People showed love, voted for me, hugged me and were ready to wait in 100°F (38 °C) heat. No troll can understand this. I choose to be positive and a few people cannot change the multi-cultural matrix that is New York,' he says. Fully aware of the constituency he has carefully built, Vijay never lets the ball drop, beginning his work day at 9.30 am and finishing it at 2 am. 'That's why I am only married to my restaurant,' he says, laughing out loud. While he refuses to divulge anything more about his personal life, he lets us in on one secret. 'I use kalpasi or black stone flower, a very underappreciated spice. Once you cook with it, there's so much flavour and smokiness,' says Vijay. There are many more secrets to be unearthed. But Vijay believes in the Tamil proverb, 'Kadamai sei, palanai etharparathey (Do your duty, don't worry about the result).'
Time of India
38 minutes ago
- Time of India
Indian biscuits, shampoos & poha go global: FMCG exports outpace domestic sales for HUL, Dabur and others
Kolkata: Smartphones may have sizzled their way to become the country's largest exported goods in the last fiscal year, but Indiamade daily use consumer goods such as biscuits, noodles, packaged gram flour, soaps and shampoos are also rapidly making inroads into global shelves. Top fast-moving consumer goods companies like Hindustan Unilever (HUL), ITC , Marico , Godrej Consumer Products , Dabur and AWL Agri Business (formerly Adani Wilmar) have reported faster growth in their export revenue compared with local sales in the past two fiscal years. While international business accounts for only 3% of the turnover for some like HUL due to their very large domestic operations, it brings more than 20% of the revenue for companies such as Dabur, Emami and Marico. Unilever India Exports Ltd, HUL's wholly owned subsidiary for exports to other Unilever companies globally, posted an 8% increase in sales at Rs 1,258 crore in the last financial year ended March 31, according to HUL's annual report. Its net profit rose 14% to Rs 91 crore. HUL's total sales, meanwhile, grew at a tepid pace of 2%, weighed by weak domestic demand. The company attributed the export growth to products in skin care, lifestyle nutrition, hair care and personal wash, driven by brands like Dove, Horlicks, Vaseline, Pears, Bru, Sunsilk, Glow and Lovely, Pond's, Lakme and Lifebuoy. It's not just basmati rice, traditionally a top commodity for exports from India, which is in high demand, said Angshu Mallick, chief executive at AWL Agri Business, India's largest packaged edible oil company. Mustard and sunflower oil, atta, besan (gram flour), soya nuggets and poha (flattened rice) all are seeing strong demand in foreign markets, he said. 'We are just scratching the surface. The proliferation of Indian restaurants and popularity of Indian cuisines in the West is driving the exports. And it's not just the Indian diaspora but even the local people (in foreign markets) are buying these,' said Mallick, predicting that exports could rise 50-80% this fiscal year. While demand is strong, a push from the government through export-focussed programmes like production-linked incentive schemes (PLI) for the food processing industry and millet-based products are also helping boost shipments, industry executives said. The government in December said it had selected 73 companies for benefits under the PLI scheme for marketing Indianbranded food products in global markets. AWL said in its latest annual report that its branded export business grew threefold in the past three years to cross Rs 250 crore in FY25. Godrej Consumer Products said in an investor presentation that the operating margin of its international business expanded to 17% in FY25 from 10% two years earlier. Marico told analysts recently that its export business is scaling up fast and it posted 14% growth in constant currency terms (excluding the impact of currency movements) in FY25, compared with overall growth of 12%. At Dabur, exports grew 17% against a 1.3% expansion in consolidated revenue. ITC Ltd said in its latest annual report that the company is seeing 'green shoots' in exports of biscuits, noodles and snacks while its Aashirvaad Atta is already the market leader in several countries. 'ITC is also exploring strategic opportunities in proximal markets as a potential vector of growth going forward,' it said. While a bulk of ITC's foreign exchange earnings from export is still driven by agri-commodities export revenue rose 7% to Rs 7,708 crore in FY25 — its FMCG export is set to become the next growth driver. The firm said its FMCG products are now sold in over 70 countries. Exports of other consumer goods from apparel, jewellery and consumer electronics to automobiles have also grown last fiscal year. Economic Times WhatsApp channel )
