Chinese EV makers are cashing in on Western luxury knockoffs

28 August 2025 at 05:00

Chinese automakers are imitating not to flatter but to profit. Companies such as Chery, Xiaomi, and Zeekr appear to be drawing heavily from premium Western car designs, banking on familiar...

VinFast speeds into India after U.S. U-turn

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

4 August 2025 at 02:40

VinFast is building factories faster than it can sell cars. The Vietnamese electric-vehicle maker opened its first Indian factory on August 4, betting on expansion even as its existing plant...

Mr. Pham Sanh Chau, CEO of VinFast Asia and Mr. Ashwin Ashok Patil, Deputy CEO of Sales & Marketing at VinFast India at the at the Bharat Mobility Global Expo 2025 where Vinfast announced its first electric vehicles for the Indian market.

BYD distracted the world while Chinese EV peers staged a coup

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

22 July 2025 at 05:00

Everyone watched BYD overtake Tesla, and missed the quiet march of a pack of other Chinese automakers. Six of the world’s top 10 electric-vehicle sellers last year were Chinese. From...

A Geely electric vehicle at the Beijing Auto Show in April 2024.

Ride-hailing giants’ electric promises are stalling worldwide

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

17 July 2025 at 05:00

The biggest ride-hailing companies globally are struggling to keep their electric vehicle promises. In 2020, Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing company, set a target for all its rides and deliveries...

Tesla finally enters India after a decade of false starts

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

16 July 2025 at 05:00

Tesla finally arrived in India — fashionably late to its own party. After almost a decade of broken promises and dashed hopes, Tesla opened its first showroom in Mumbai on...

Tesla opened its first India showroom at the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai on Tuesday, July 15, 2025.

Meta’s grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

7 July 2025 at 05:00

Meta’s fintech ambitions have failed to take off in India — the company’s largest market, with over 500 million WhatsApp users. When WhatsApp first began testing payments in India back...

India wants its own EV market, but needs China to get there

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

18 June 2025 at 05:00

India is betting on Chinese technology to keep its electric-vehicle transition on track. At a time when the U.S. is erecting trade barriers to keep Chinese EV giants at bay,...

India’s richest man can’t crack e-commerce, even with Shein

Rest of World

By: Kunal Purohit and Ananya Bhattacharya

23 May 2025 at 05:00

Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man. The Shein India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction...

India’s richest man can’t crack e-commerce, even with Shein

Rest of World

By: Kunal Purohit and Ananya Bhattacharya

23 May 2025 at 05:00

Online retail continues to elude India’s richest man. The Shein India app, launched by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Retail in partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion giant, has struggled to gain traction...

Will India’s new satellite internet rules impact Starlink’s ambitions? We asked five experts

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

7 May 2025 at 07:03

India has just made it harder for Starlink to enter the market. Around two months after Starlink announced retail partnerships with the country’s leading telecom operators, India — home to...

Foxconn’s iPhone factory is fueling a real estate boom in a small Indian farming town

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

17 April 2025 at 05:00

Foxconn’s arrival is quickly changing a rural town in southern India into a real estate hot spot. Devanahalli, located on the outskirts of India’s tech hub, Bengaluru, is home to...

A Trump H-1B crackdown could hit Big Tech hard, with Amazon suffering most

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

24 March 2025 at 05:00

As U.S. President Donald Trump sends mixed signals on the H-1B visa program, Amazon could find itself in a tight spot. The $2 trillion tech giant has bagged the most...

Screaming customers, unpaid workers: Inside the chaotic demise of Indian online delivery pioneer Dunzo

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

20 March 2025 at 05:00

India’s booming quick-commerce sector saw a major casualty earlier this year. Dunzo, the first Indian startup to receive a direct investment from Google in 2017, shut down in January, leaving...

How Tesla blew its lead

Rest of World

By: Itika Sharma Punit and Ananya Bhattacharya

19 March 2025 at 05:00

Tesla is having a tough year. Once a world leader in the electric-vehicle market, the company’s sales across the U.S., China, and several European countries fell year on year in...

The decline of India’s largest EV company — in charts

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

13 March 2025 at 05:00

India’s largest electric vehicle company is in trouble. Shares of Ola Electric Mobility hit an all-time low on March 3 — down more than 60% from its peak in August...

Is Google Maps fatally misleading drivers in India? It’s complicated

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

5 February 2025 at 06:00

Earlier this week, an Indian politician urged the country’s Parliament to support homegrown alternatives to Google Maps — blaming the popular navigation app for fatal accidents. Incidents due to Google...

GPS maps in India can fail to account for the realities of the roads.

Non-Western founders say DeepSeek is proof that innovation need not cost billions of dollars

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

30 January 2025 at 10:15

During a trip to India in 2023, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sparked controversy when he said it was “hopeless” for a young team with less than $10 million to compete...

DeepSeek has been celebrated by some outside of Silicon Valley as an affordable alternative to ChatGPT

The global struggle over how to regulate AI

Rest of World

By: Katie McQue · Laís Martins · Ananya Bhattacharya and Carien du Plessis

21 January 2025 at 06:00

In March 2024, a Brazilian senator traveled on a commercial flight to Washington, D.C. Marcos Pontes, a 61-year-old former astronaut, had become a central figure in the effort to regulate...

Global fact-checkers were disappointed, not surprised, Meta ended its program

Rest of World

By: Ananya Bhattacharya

10 January 2025 at 12:06

Meta’s fact-checking partners around the world are disappointed — but not surprised — by Facebook’s move to do away with fact-checking by trained teams. In a January 7 blog post,...

FILE -- Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta, testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child sexual exploitation on Capitol Hill in Washington, Jan. 31, 2024.

Pakistan’s mass transit is failing. BusCaro thinks it has the solution

Rest of World

By: Zuha Siddiqui and Ananya Bhattacharya

16 December 2024 at 06:00

The day mass transit startup Swvl announced its decision to downsize operations in Pakistan in June 2022, its country general manager Maha Shahzad fully grasped the dire circumstances that female...

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