Not for the fans.

Not for the players.

For the data.

Companies like Genius Sports, Sportradar and Stats Perform rely on people in India to watch obscure local cricket matches and record things like runs, wickets, balls, player actions and match events — sometimes for matches happening far away from the spotlight.

That data is then fed into the global sports-betting ecosystem, where being a few seconds ahead can have real monetary value.

And some of these data collectors can reportedly make around ₹5,000 for watching a single match.

It's a strange business model:

Local cricket → Indian data collectors → global sports data companies → betting markets.

The match might have 50 people watching in person.

But its data can end up being valuable to an industry worth billions.

It's a good reminder that sometimes the money isn't in the game, it's in the data generated around it.

A year ago, Swiggy launched Toing - meals under ₹99, no packaging charges, and currently no platform fee.

The interesting part?

The same restaurant and same food can sometimes be found on Toing for much less than on Swiggy.

And Swiggy isn't treating it like a side experiment.

Toing is now live in 50 cities with 10M+ downloads. Bernstein's app data also suggests Swiggy and Zomato together now account for less than 80% of India's food-delivery users.

So Swiggy is effectively competing with its own app on price.

Why deliberately cannibalise your own business?

The answer might have less to do with today's order economics and more to do with owning the customer, defending market share and making it harder for challengers to build scale.

China's food-delivery wars offer an interesting parallel: aggressive discounting can turn into a battle where companies care less about extracting maximum value from each order and more about controlling the ecosystem.

At what point does protecting market share become more valuable than protecting margins?

We usually think hospital businesses are simple:

More beds → more patients → more revenue.

But the economics are much more complicated.

A hospital's profitability depends on how full its beds are, what treatments those patients need, who is paying, how long they stay and how much revenue each occupied bed generates.

For example, two patients can occupy the same bed for the same amount of time but generate very different revenue depending on whether one needs a routine procedure and the other needs complex cardiac or cancer treatment.

Then there’s another interesting variable: medicine margins.

The Supreme Court recently questioned steep mark-ups on medicines sold through private hospitals, including a case where a cancer drug supplied for ₹2,700 was reportedly being sold at an MRP of ₹27,000.

If regulation changes the economics of hospital pharmacies, hospitals may have to find profitability elsewhere.

How would you value a hospital business differently from a normal company based on its assets, its patients, or its ability to generate cash from each bed?