In this week's wrapup, we talk about TCS’ copy-paste saga, a new sticky situation for Byju’s, SEBI’s rule tweaks that could encourage insider trading and more.

For the markets edition this week, we talked about stationery maker Flair and its successful IPO. You can read it here.

Meanwhile, here’s a recap of what we wrote over the week.

SEBI wants to make ‘insider' trading easier?

If you’re a top executive in a company you could be privy to Unpublished Price Sensitive Information (UPSI). This means that you possess some secret business information about the company that the public isn’t aware of. And if you buy or sell your own company’s stock by acting upon such information, the SEBI could accuse you of insider trading.

But, as a part of the company, there’s also a chance that a big part of your compensation comes in the form of stocks. And you might want to sell them now and then to fund your vacations or even invest in real estate. But if you’re always in possession of the UPSI, then doing that can be hard.

So market regulator SEBI actually has a mechanism called a Trading Plan to make things fair. Executives like you can simply automate the stock selling price. Say you have 120 shares in your account on the 1st of January. You could create a Trading Plan and tell your company that you will sell 10 shares on the fifth day of every month. But the rules behind this could be rigid and executives don’t seem to like it.

That’s why the SEBI recently planned to tweak it. And the problem with that is that the new rules could make insider selling easier. So we wrote a story about it. You can read it here.

India is stepping on the ‘Bio’gas

Biogas is a miracle fuel. And plenty of raw materials like food and farm waste can be converted to make it. It can boost farmer income through manure sales and provide organic fertilizer. And at a macro level, replacing 20% of natural gas consumption with biogas by 2030 could save $29 billion in imports.

So, the government has an ambitious plan. From 2025, it wants to make blending compressed biogas (CBG) with piped natural gas (PNG) and compressed natural gas (CNG) mandatory. But there’s a problem. In 2018, they’d set a goal to have 5,000 operational biogas plants by 2023. But as of now, only 48 plants have been commissioned. And this means there could be some hiccups that the government needs to fix. We wrote about it in our Tuesday’s story here.

Did copy-paste really cost TCS $200 million?

Last week a jury in the US court slapped a $210 million fine on TCS. What for? Well, TCS was found guilty of stealing source code and confidential information from an American company. And guess what? TCS has done this in the past too.

If you’re curious about what unfolded, here’s a story about the ‘copy-paste’ saga.

Byju’s owes Indian cricket ₹160 crores?

In 2017, Chinese phone maker Oppo signed a ₹1,100 crore deal to sponsor the Indian cricket team's jersey. But just a couple of years intot he deal, it felt that it may have overpaid for it and was looking to exit. Byju’s, that had already become the most valuable edtech in the world by then, jumped at the opportunity. It even offered a 10% higher price in 2022 to extend the deal till November 2023.

But soon, Byju’s financial position came spiralling down. Its revenues plummeted and losses soared. So resorting to cost cutting measures meant that Byju's sought to cancel the jersey deal. But the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), anticipated that it would be difficult to find a replacement, and naturally resisted. This put Byju’s in a tough spot because it couldn’t pay up its dues to the BCCI. And this meant that the BCCI dragged Byju’s to a special court.

You can read our story about it here.

Will TikTok finally beat Amazon at e-commerce?

TikTok wants to take over the e-commerce world. It wants to control everything about the social shopping experience. This means that the entire shopping process, including discovery, buying, and payment stays within the app. So, it built a platform called TikTok Shop. And it has found success in Southeast Asia.

But that’s not enough for TikTok. It wants to take TikTok Shop beyond its niche markets and become an e-commerce giant across the US and the UK. But can it? Here’s our story about TikTok's attempt to make it big in the social commerce business.

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We hope you enjoyed the weekly wrapup. Have a great weekend!

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