Side Notes by Zerodha Varsity

Aswath Damodaran called Walmart's acquisition of Flipkart the most expensive facelift in history. He felt Walmart wanted to feel young again by acquiring a modern-age e-commerce company in a developi…

L&T wanted to diversify out of infrastructure-related businesses. It was looking for targets. Mindtree was not looking for buyers, but it came on L&T's radar because of VG Sidhartha's struggles at Ca…

Rene Lacoste, a French Tennis prodigy, first wore a crocodile logo on his blazer. After his tennis career, he launched the Lacoste brand of tennis shirts, which, of course, had the signature crocodil…

WhatsApp is perhaps the only messaging app in the world that is free and does not display ads when you use it. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, everybody thought WhatsApp would now st…

Tata Steel punched above its weight when it acquired Corus, a UK-based steelmaker, in 2007. It was touted as the coming-of-age for corporate India. However, it soon became a tale of caution. Was it o…

When you think of Vaseline, the first thing that comes to mind is petroleum jelly. And there is a reason for it. As one of the most recognized personal care products, Vaseline has a very interesting …

Mr. Ratan Tata's vision gave birth to the Tata Nano, which the engineers at Tata Motors made a reality. Perhaps some marketing missteps impeded the Nano from attracting customer interest as great as …

Labubu dolls have single-handedly transformed Pop Mart from a domestic toy retailer in China to a global toy retailer with stores in the most upmarket streets of London, Paris, and Los Angeles, and s…

In 1980, two Texas oil billionaires, the Hunt Brothers, tried to corner the global silver market. From secret Swiss accounts and offshore trusts to futures contracts and a full-blown silver mania, th…

How did replacing soap bars with liquid handwash renew the soap market's business potential? How did Colgate use a simple ad message to renew the toothpaste market's business potential?

Zerodha Varsi…

The 100+ year-old Cadbury brand has had multiple owners. Kraft, Mondelez, and Heinz were side actors in this story, and Warren Buffett also made a cameo.

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A Hershey's hazelnut chocolate spread is used to make breakfast toasts, for baking cakes and cookies, and as a topping on fruits and desserts. But before reaching your table, the spread traverses thr…

Five Gulf countries - Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the UAE - used the Indian rupee as a legal tender until the late 1950s and early 1960s. But it became a problem for India. So the RBI introduce…

A semiconductor is a small card or chip inside your phone, laptop, smartwatch, or other digital device. That small chip has a value chain that spans thousands of players across many countries. Semico…

The US extracts oil trapped in hardened shale rocks. The technology used in drilling through shale rocks and extracting oil is difficult and expensive. America's peak capitalism helped make it cheape…

Petrol, diesel, natural gas, fertilizers, plastics, rubber, detergents, and fragrances all have origins in crude oil (hydrocarbon) extraction. Crude oil runs deep in our daily lives, so it is underst…

Unlike most companies that aim for maximum capacity utilization, Zara deliberately operates below full capacity and is even willing to ship half-empty trucks or containers. The less-than-optimal capa…

LTCM  had four co-founders - Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, who were famous for developing the Black-Scholes-Merton model of deriving option prices, and later also went on to win a Nobel Prize; Dav…

Bradley Birkenfeld was an American banker working for UBS in Switzerland. He blew the whistle on how UBS enabled American clients to skirt the tax laws. The investigation that followed forced Switzer…

Around the 1990s, Yasuo Hamanaka of Sumitomo Corporation came to control 5% of the world's copper. He used various unscrupulous means, such as fake trades, forged documents, and hoarding, to manipula…