One quick thing: Apple is gearing up to launch its first retail store in India later this month. The iPhone maker today unveiled the Kaali Peeli taxi art-inspired barricade of the upcoming retail store, called Apple BKC, at the Jio World Drive Mall in Mumbai. 

• To commemorate this occasion, Apple also released the Apple BKC wallpaper and a specially curated playlist on Apple Music.

In today’s newsletter:

• Paytm, PhonePe seek larger lending pie
• Stand Up India helps nearly 2 lakh entrepreneurs
• Google's loss is a boost for Make in India: ASG Venkataraman

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For two consecutive quarters now, Paytm has been disbursing more than 100,000 loans a day on average, the company’s public filings showed.

• After the stock market punishment for having its fingers in too many pies, the fintech major has doubled down on lending in the past year

• Paytm's loan disbursals grew 253% to Rs 12,554 crore in the March quarter, even as the number of loans jumped 82% to 1.19 crore

• The company's device subscriptions, which consist of soundboxes and play a crucial role in merchant loans, grew by 1 million during the period, reaching a total of 6.8 million

We had written about the soundbox wars last year — how these devices created a rift between Paytm and PhonePe. The main reason fintechs love the idea of a soundbox is that it creates merchant retention in small shops better than any other payment device.

• Using this as a foot in the door, they want to be able to sell loans and other financial services to the merchants

PhonePe has taken a step forward in this direction by launching digital lending pilots with merchants, according to its founder Sameer Nigam.

It’s not only the ‘tech bros’ getting funded to start up in India. 

Stand Up India, a government initiative aimed at promoting entrepreneurship, has disbursed loans worth over Rs 40,000 crore to more than 1.8 lakh entrepreneurs in the past 7 years, as per the finance ministry. The beneficiaries include:

• 1,44,787 women entrepreneurs
  
  
• 26,889 belonged to the Scheduled Castes (SC)
  
  
• 8,960 from the Scheduled Tribes (ST)

Despite the dwindling startup funding in the private equity and venture capital ecosystem over the last year, the Stand Up India Scheme has remained active, disbursing about Rs 10,000 crore, which accounts for 25% of the total debt funding in the past 12 months.

• The scheme facilitates bank loans ranging between Rs 10 lakh to Rs 1 crore for setting up a greenfield enterprise in manufacturing, services, agriculture

• In order to qualify for the loan, at least 51% of the startup must be owned by an SC, ST, or woman entrepreneur

The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s (NCLAT) recent ruling against Google is a landmark judgement on abuse of dominance and will have a direct impact on the country's Make in India initiative, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) N Venkataraman told us in an interview. 

"After NCLAT’s order, the gates are open for innovation, and you can enter the market on a free and reasonable basis. The complete eclipse formed by Google over all the OEMs and app developers goes; they are now free to do whatever they want to do," Venkataraman said.

On March 29, the tribunal upheld the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) Rs 1,338 crore penalty on Google, saying that the competition watchdog's order does not suffer from any ‘confirmation bias’. Venkataraman had argued the case for CCI. 

• Google indeed reduces the incentive of the OEMs to develop their own version of Android (Android forks) by imposing conditions through its Anti Fragmentation Agreement (AFA) that bars OEMs from developing and distributing Android forks, it held.

In January, Google announced sweeping changes to its Android business in India, including allowing device makers to license its individual apps to pre-install on their devices and giving users the option to choose their default search engine.

• Read: Amazon aims to expand its Fire TV business in India through partnerships

NCLAT had set aside four of the 10 remedial measures ordered by the CCI in its Android antitrust ruling. Industry executives have previously said these were of more consequence than the penalty amount since it directly impacted the tech giant's business model. More on that here. 

• Venkataraman, however, termed it as "very, very marginal reliefs" and said NCLAT has upheld 98% of CCI’s order

These comments come as the Parliament clears the Competition Amendment Bill, which proposes that penalties for violations will now be based on a company's global turnover rather than its domestic turnover.

PhonePe bolstered its e-commerce offering yesterday by launching a new hyperlocal buyer app, Pincode, on top of India's ONDC (open network for digital commerce) framework.

Is the Walmart-backed decacorn now challenging its former owner and a fellow Walmart-backed company, Flipkart? Here’s what PhonePe co-founder and chief executive Sameer Nigam has to say:

“We're never going to try and compete with Flipkart or Amazon in terms of supply chain logistics. Been there, done that, loved it, but don't want to ever do it again. We want to take all these offline shops live with the least amount of effort and focus on the consumer experience.”

Read more about Pincode, PhonePe's plans to monetize it, what Nigam has to say about the now-failed ZestMoney deal, the BNPL (buy-now-pay-later) frenzy, and more in an interview with us.

Fifty years ago, on April 5, 1973, Pioneer 11 was launched from Cape Canaveral on a daring mission. 

The small satellite would venture dangerously close to Jupiter's surface and navigate through Saturn's outer rings, paving the way for even more ambitious explorations of our solar system. (Picture credit: NASA)

• Binance faced a 16% decline in its market share of trade volume lately, as a result of ending its zero-fee trading program and a lawsuit filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
  
  
• OpenSea today announced the launch of OpenSea Pro, a marketplace aimed at professional NFT traders, in response to Blur's success in the growing NFT market.

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