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Vol. CXVII · No. 4,892

Belagavi · 24°C · Light Cloud

Thursday, 18 December 2025 · ₹ 12.00

— A SOUTH-INDIAN BUSINESS DAILY · ESTABLISHED MCMVIII —

— Lead Story · Markets

Sensex closes at record high as rupee firms; FII flows tick up for fourth straight session.

By VIKRAM SHETTY · Markets Editor · Mumbai

The benchmark Sensex broke past 78,400 in Thursday's session, marking its eighth all-time high in fourteen sessions, as foreign institutional investors continued the buying spree that has defined this December.

Net FII inflows touched ₹4,820 crore in cash markets, the highest since the August recovery, while the rupee strengthened to 82.94 against the dollar — its firmest close since the September Federal Reserve commentary.

"The combination of moderating inflation, dovish central-bank language, and a clear earnings recovery in tier-one names is keeping the bid in," said Anjali Krishnan, chief equity strategist at Mahindra Securities. "We see no near-term reason for that to change."

Banking led the charge for a fourth day, with HDFC Bank up 2.1%, ICICI up 1.8%, and the Nifty PSU Bank index closing 3.4% higher. Auto stocks underperformed marginally on news that Maruti would delay its January price hike by a fortnight.

Continue reading · 8 min →

— Opinion

The case for treating Indian micro-D2C as a serious export business

For too long, the SME D2C founder has been pitched payment gateways and warehouses. What they actually need is policy that treats them like exporters of value-added taste.

India's micro-D2C cohort — roughly 8,400 brands earning between ₹50 lakh and ₹15 crore in annual revenue — is the country's most underrated export story. They sit on the same supply chains as our largest FMCG companies, but with a quarter of the marketing overhead and three times the cultural fluency in the regions they serve.

A. TALLUR · Editorial Board

— Analysis

Why the next billion users won't speak English to their bank apps

Vernacular voice interfaces are the largest underbuilt opportunity in Indian fintech today. The institutions that win it will define the decade.

Walk into a Vijay Sales in Hubballi and ask a salesperson how customers learn to use the smartphones they buy. Most will tell you the same thing: through their children, through YouTube, and increasingly through voice. The intersection of three forces — falling data prices, Indic ASR breakthroughs at the foundation-model level, and rural smartphone penetration crossing 60% — has created a generational opening.

N. SUNDARAM · Tech

— Letter from the Editor

On the discipline of long-form business journalism in an era of three-paragraph attention

The Bellwether's commitment to story length is, paradoxically, a defence of the reader's time. Here is why we publish at 2,000 words even when the metrics tell us not to.

We get the question almost daily: in a market that has trained itself to read 800-character pull-quotes on social platforms, why does The Bellwether still publish business analyses at 2,000 and 4,000 words? The honest answer is that we believe long-form is the only form in which capital markets, policy, and consumer behaviour can be explained with the precision they require.

M. RAO · Editor-in-Chief

— Markets · Close of Play · 5:30 PM IST

Sensex

78,407.21

▲ 412.04 · +0.53%

Nifty 50

23,694.05

▲ 124.20 · +0.53%

Bank Nifty

51,204.40

▲ 822.10 · +1.63%

USD / INR

82.9400

▼ 0.0214 · -0.03%

10Y G-Sec

7.184%

▼ 0.014 bps

Brent Crude

$78.42

▲ $1.18 · +1.5%

Sensex closes at record high as rupee firms; FII flows tick up for fourth straight session.

The case for treating Indian micro-D2C as a serious export business

Why the next billion users won't speak English to their bank apps

On the discipline of long-form business journalism in an era of three-paragraph attention

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