Breaking: India's real-money gaming industry has slammed GST Council's new 28% tax slab, stating that it will ‘wipe out the industry’

One quick thing: Tata Group is on the verge of becoming the first Indian iPhone maker

In today’s newsletter:

• Amazon's confusing payment strategy in India
• Delhi pips Bengaluru on ONDC orders
• Foxconn firm on the Indian semiconductor dream

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? You can sign up for Tech3 here

One size doesn't fit all: Amazon's everything store model doesn't seem to work for payments

Amazon Pay’s confusing payment strategy has given the company mixed results. 

• Back in 2020, Amazon Pay had around 2.5 percent market share on UPI, which has now come down to a minuscule 0.6 percent in the last few months.

From a clear fourth place in UPI rankings just a year ago, Amazon Pay has now slipped to fifth place, overtaken by upstart Cred in terms of volume.

The problem seems to be the its bewildering array of payment options including wallet (popularly known as Amazon Pay Balance), buy-now-pay-later, UPI and its cobranded credit card with ICICI Bank.

This has probably taken away the online retail giant’s focus from doubling down on UPI, which has emerged as the most important digital payment service in the country. 

• The success of its credit card also meant that the company is enticed to offer more incentives on Amazon. 

Amazon Pay executives wanted the division and the financial services to be a separate app, which was not approved by the company.

Indian consumers also seem to prefer to keep their apps separate for each use-case, as indicated by WhatsApp’s failure to make a dent in the country’s payments space.

Read our deep dive

Delhi was inundated by rains last Sunday, either delaying hyperlocal deliveries or bringing them to a standstill. 

In what can be described as making the best out of a bad situation, ONDC players in the national capital saw their orders go up. 

So far, Bengaluru has been ONDC’s order-driver, with the city registering the most number of orders. However, after ONDC went live on Delhi-NCR in beta on July 5, it has delivered more orders (11,000) than in Bengaluru (7,000) on July 9, the day in question.

• The next three cities in terms of order numbers were Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune, logging order volumes in the range of 2,500-3,000 each.

Additionally, ONDC also hit a fresh high of 35,000 orders in the retail category on the same day.

• ONDC started its beta phase of testing in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Kolkata as well, along with Delhi-NCR.

The network is gearing up to hit 200,000 transactions a day by the end of the year, the interoperable network's chief executive officer T Koshy said at the Moneycontrol Startup Conclave last week.

• ONDC came under criticism recently after it used discounts to fuel a 100x growth between March and May

Since then, the network has seen its growth slide as it substantially reduced discounts and incentives

Alongside its existing offerings, Koshy also said that ONDC is working to bring financial products to the network, and this is expected to happen in the next couple of months.

If there was any doubt on Foxconn's long term plans for India, safe to say, that it has been put to rest.

In a two-page document, stylised in the form of a FAQ, the Taiwanese contract manufacturing giant has reaffirmed its commitment to the Make In India pledge of the country, and of establishing a semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in the country.

• “Foxconn has no intention to do anything but continue to strongly support the government’s 'Make In India' ambitions…” it said. 

Next, the company will submit an application under the Modified Programme for Semiconductors and Display Fab Ecosystem policy.

This policy aims to provide incentive to companies or consortia engaged in silicon semiconductor fabs and so on.

• The company has also been reviewing the "landscape for optimal partners".

The company also touched on the subject of their joint venture with mines to oil conglomerate Vedanta being called of and said that the separation was mutual

• "There were challenging gaps we were not able to smoothly overcome," Foxconn said.

On July 11, 2017, tech billionaire Elon Musk said that he has bought back X.com from PayPal, a domain he owned way back in 1999. 

X.com was one of the world's first online banks, co-founded by Musk, Harris Fricker, Christopher Payne, and Ed Ho. It later merged with rival Confinity Inc. The combined entity rebranded itself as PayPal. 

X.com is now linked to Elon Musk's plan of launching an "everything app", with Twitter termed as an accelerant to fulfil this vision.

• OpenAI has made its in-house ChatGPT plugin Code Interpreter available to all Plus subscribers. It will help people analyse data, create charts, and edit files among others. 

• China's internet watchdog is reportedly laying down rules that will force companies to obtain a licence before they release generative AI models.

The hybrid work culture is here to stay. This has made it increasingly difficult to know whether your coworkers are working from home, office or an external place on any given day, especially when you are trying to arrange a meeting

Google Calendar's latest feature aims to help people resolve this confusion. It now lets users indicate where they are working from for specific portions of the day. 

• For instance, you can specify that you are working from home in the morning and will be in the office in the afternoon.