Author: Neel Achary

SKF India Limited announces financial results for Q1 FY2026-27

Pune, Aug 12: SKF India  Limited , India’s  technology and solutions provider of bearings and units, condition monitoring, and services, announced its financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.

During this quarter, SKF India Limited reported revenue from operations of Rs. 9,707.7 million with profit before tax at Rs. 869.2 million, showcasing the company’s steady execution and resilience in a dynamic business environment.

FINANCIAL HIGHLIGHTS (Q1 FY 26-27)

Mukund Vasudevan, MD, SKF India (Industrial) Limited and President – India, Southeast Asia and Middle East, said,

“FY 2026-27 begins from a position of strength. In our 3rd quarter as a focused, independent business, SKF India (Industrial) delivered 18.3% year-on-year Sales growth, while maintaining a healthy 9% PBT (in spite of headwinds from currency and demerger-related expenses). Growth was strong across most sectors including Wind, General Machinery and Agriculture (Tractors). We attribute this performance to staying genuinely close to our customers and maintaining a strong operational discipline.

India’s manufacturing and infrastructure sectors are still expanding and our performance is validation of our three-prongedstrategy – customer centricity, localization and innovation. At the core of everything we do is a simple goal: help our customers achieve more, with less friction.”

STRATEGIC OUTLOOK

As India’s industrial and economic landscape evolves, so does the company’s approach, with a growing emphasis on sustainable practices, manufacturing precision, and smarter, digitally-enabled operations. This shift is helping the company stay closely aligned with the needs of industries across India and Southeast Asia as they navigate their own periods of rapid change.

InvoiceCloud Appoints Sharon Joy as India HR Head to Drive Talent, Culture, and GCC Growth

Aug 12: InvoiceCloud, a leading provider of digital billing and payment solutions, today announced the appointment of Sharon Joy as Head of Human Resources, India. Based in Hyderabad, Sharon will lead the people mandate for InvoiceCloud‘s Global Capability Centre (GCC), shaping the talent, leadership, culture, and employee experience agenda as the company enters its next phase of expansion in the country.

In her new role, Sharon will partner with Biju Davis, Senior Vice President and India Site Leader, and Jessi Marcoff, Chief People Officer at InvoiceCloud‘s Boston headquarters, to build an HR strategy that supports the company’s expanding innovation mandate. Her appointment comes as InvoiceCloud scales its Hyderabad GCC into a high-impact centre for technology, product development, and operational excellence.

Biju Davis, who has been leading InvoiceCloud‘s India site, sees the appointment as central to the company’s next phase, “Building a high-performing, values-led organisation is at the heart of where we are headed. Sharon brings the strategic maturity, global exposure, and people-first leadership we need, her experience across complex, technology-driven organisations will be invaluable as we strengthen the capabilities that power our innovation.”

Sharon brings over two decades of experience leading people strategy across technology, consulting, financial services, and product-led organisations. She joins InvoiceCloud from Centime Inc., a US-based fintech company, where she served as Senior Director of Human Resources for over six years, overseeing the HR function across India and the United States. Her earlier roles at Cognizant, Optum Global Solutions, Virtusa, DXC Technology, and Tech Mahindra built her expertise across talent strategy, employee lifecycle management, diversity and inclusion, HR operations, leadership development, and organisational transformation, working with cross-functional teams across India, the United States, Ireland, and the Philippines.

Jessi Marcoff, Chief People Officer, InvoiceCloud, said, “India is central to our future, and the people’s experience we build here matters enormously, not just for our teams in Hyderabad but for the company globally. Sharon brings exactly the kind of people-first leadership we need at this stage of our growth. She understands how to build culture intentionally, and that’s what will make the difference as we scale.”

Reflecting on her new role, Sharon said, “I am excited to be part of InvoiceCloud‘s growth journey and to help shape the Hyderabad GCC into a centre of real depth and impact. I look forward to partnering with Biju, Jessi, and the team to build a culture of trust, teamwork, and customer focus.”

Sharon‘s appointment further strengthens InvoiceCloud‘s India leadership team and reinforces its commitment to building a people-first, innovation-led organisation, while supporting continued hiring across product, engineering, AI, and specialised technology roles in India.

Azul Names Kenny Johnston Chief Product Officer

Product leader with deep agentic AI and enterprise platform experience joins to accelerate Azul’s AI-first Java roadmap across performance, security, cost and productivity

SINGAPORE — Aug 12 — Azul, the trusted leader in enterprise Java for today’s AI -first world, today announced the appointment of Kenny Johnston as chief product officer (CPO). Johnston brings deep experience building agentic, AI-powered enterprise DevOps and observability tools and platforms and will lead product strategy for Azul’s AI-first Java platform — engineered to meet the performance, security and cost demands of running enterprise AI workloads at scale.

Most recently, Johnston served as chief product and technology officer at Luciq, an agentic AI observability platform built for enterprise mobile app teams, where he led global product, design, customer success and engineering functions delivering agentic capabilities such as SmartResolve and Agentic Mode. Earlier in his career, Johnston was senior director of product management at GitLab, where he led product management for all operations and infrastructure products including GitLab CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, Package & Release Management as well as Observability and Incident Response. At Rackspace, he served as director of product management for Rackspace Private Cloud, more than tripling annual revenue and earning recognition as HPE’s Global Service Provider Partner of the Year.

As CPO at Azul, Johnston will lead product strategy and execution across Azul’s AI-first Java platform — Azul Prime, Azul Core, Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Payara Micro and Azul Payara Server, the latter two added to the Azul platform through Azul’s December 2025 acquisition of Payara. His mandate is to advance the roadmap around the demands AI is placing on every enterprise Java estate: cost, performance, security, modernization and productivity.

“Java is the backbone of the world’s most critical enterprise systems, and AI is amplifying the pressure on all of it,” said Johnston. “The opportunity is to bring an AI-first, DevOps-centric vision to how Java is developed, deployed, secured and monitored in the enterprise. I’ve spent my career helping world-class teams accelerate through transformative moments like this, and I’m excited to build on the strong foundation Azul has already established.”

“Kenny’s track record of scaling enterprise product organizations to build products that address business-critical use cases makes him exactly the right product leader as AI reshapes the performance, security and cost demands of every enterprise Java estate,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO. “Under his leadership, we’re focused on continuing to build out our AI-first Java platform and helping drive Azul into its next phase of growth.”

FAQs

What is an AI-first Java platform?

An AI-first Java platform is a Java runtime and application platform built and optimized to support AI-driven, agentic software development, with the performance, observability and security enterprises need to run AI-driven workloads at scale. Azul’s AI-first Java platform spans Azul Prime, Azul Core, Intelligence Cloud, Payara Micro and Payara Server, added through its December 2025 acquisition of Payara.

Why do enterprises use Java for AI applications?

Java’s maturity, portability and performance make it a common foundation for the enterprise systems that AI capabilities access and integrate with, and modern JVMs can be tuned to meet the low-latency, high-throughput demands of AI workloads. Azul’s AI-first Java platform is designed to deliver that performance, strengthen security and help reduce the cloud costs AI workloads add, giving enterprises a meaningful advantage as they bring agentic AI into mission-critical Java environments.

Why does Java performance matter for AI applications?

The enterprise systems AI depends on are mostly written in Java, and AI is putting new pressure on them. Agentic workflows call Java services at far higher volume, and those services increasingly sit in the critical path of AI interactions. Throughput, garbage collection pauses, warm-up and memory overhead in the JVM turn into slow or inconsistent performance and response times, and the usual fix is to add capacity. Azul Prime is built to attack these bottlenecks in the runtime instead, giving enterprises a faster, more predictable Java runtime for AI-driven workloads.

What will Azul’s product roadmap focus on?

Azul’s product roadmap focuses on alleviating the pressures AI places on enterprise Java: absorbing AI workload demand and optimizing cloud cost (Azul Prime), narrowing the AI-era security and patch-velocity gap (Azul Core), enabling AI-driven modernization (Azul Intelligence Cloud, Azul Payara), and giving AI-modernized workloads the scalability, security and automation they need (all Azul products).

Sense International India Opens Hyderabad’s First Dedicated Centre for Persons with Deafblindness and Multiple Disabilities

Hyderabad, Aug 11: Sense International India, the country’s only national organisation exclusively supporting persons with deafblindness and multiple disabilities, today inaugurated ‘Sparsh, Centre for Persons with Deafblindness and Multiple Disabilities’ in Hyderabad. Supported by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Sparsh is Hyderabad’s first dedicated centre offering comprehensive services for children and adults with deafblindness and multiple disabilities.

The inauguration marks a significant milestone in Sense International India’s journey of expanding access to specialised care for one of India’s most underserved communities. Sparsh is the Sense International India’s seventh direct centre in the country, adding to a growing infrastructure of dedicated facilities that works in tandem with the organisation’s established centres in partnership with 72 organisations across 25 states, together reaching more than 84,000 children and adults with deafblindness and multiple disabilities. The two models are complementary, with Sense International India’s direct centres enabling comprehensive, integrated service delivery in regions where specialised deafblindness services remain scarce, while the partner network continues to extend the organisation’s reach across the country.

The new centre will provide a range of services under one roof, including screening and assessment, early intervention, special education, home-based intervention, vision and speech therapy, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, orientation and mobility training, and counselling for parents and caregivers. By bringing these services together, the centre aims to help children and adults with deafblindness and multiple disabilities develop communication, mobility, learning and independent living skills while reducing the need for families to travel to multiple locations for support.

Speaking on the occasion, Uttam Kumar, CEO, Sense International India, said, “The inauguration of Sparsh marks an important milestone in Sense India’s journey to expand access to specialised services for persons with deafblindness and multiple disabilities across the country. For nearly three decades, our network of 72 partner organisations across 25 states has enabled us to reach thousands of families across the country. Sparsh, our seventh direct centre, complements this strong partner network by providing comprehensive, integrated services in Hyderabad, ensuring that individuals with deafblindness and multiple disabilities receive specialised support closer to where they live. We are grateful to NPCI for their support in making this possible, and remain committed to ensuring that every individual with deafblindness has the opportunity to communicate, learn, live independently, and realise their full potential.” 

The inauguration ceremony brought together representatives from the disability sector, government, corporate organisations, special educators, volunteers, and families of persons with deafblindness and multiple disabilities. Guests toured the newly inaugurated facility and interacted with beneficiaries, caregivers, and professionals, reaffirming a shared commitment to strengthening inclusive services and expanding access to quality care across the region.

With the opening of Sparsh, Sense India is expanding access to specialised services, ensuring that more children and adults with deafblindness and multiple disabilities can receive timely support closer to home.

MRF Reports Q1 Results as Strong Vehicle Demand Drives Operations

Chennai, Aug 11: MRF Limited has reported a consolidated total income of ₹8,610.56 crore for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, compared with ₹7,804.23 crore recorded in the corresponding quarter ended June 30, 2025.

The company’s consolidated profit before tax stood at ₹649.69 crore in the first quarter of FY2026-27, compared with ₹671.83 crore in the same quarter of the previous financial year.

Provision for tax for the quarter stood at ₹154.34 crore. After accounting for tax, MRF’s consolidated net profit for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, stood at ₹495.35 crore, compared with ₹501.82 crore in the corresponding quarter of FY2025-26.

Operations

MRF delivered a resilient operating performance during the first quarter, supported by healthy demand for its products. Demand from original equipment (OE) manufacturers remained buoyant, with vehicle sales across segments witnessing strong growth.

Replacement sales also remained healthy, supported by robust demand during the quarter. However, higher input costs continued to put pressure on profitability.

During the quarter, the company implemented price increases and undertook cost management measures, which helped partially offset the impact of rising costs. Raw material prices continued to remain firm amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

MRF expects the impact of elevated input costs on margins to continue and will continue to focus on pricing and cost management measures to navigate the prevailing cost environment.

Half of Kiwi Postpaid Users Are New to Credit cards, Expanding Access to Credit on UPI for India’s Next Generation of Consumers

Mumbai, Aug 11: Kiwi, India’s fastest-growing Credit-on-UPI platform, today announced strong early adoption of Kiwi Postpaid, its Credit Line on UPI solution launched in partnership with YES BANK. Within the first 30 days of launch, nearly half of Kiwi Postpaid users were new-to-credit Cards, highlighting how Credit on UPI can enable easy access to credit for first time users across crores of UPI merchants. 

Early adoption reflects strong traction among consumer segments that have traditionally faced barriers in accessing a credit card. One in three  Kiwi Postpaid users are self-employed, 50% come from Tier II and Tier III cities, and nearly 30% belong to Gen Z, indicating growing demand for simple and digital-first credit products beyond traditionally served metro and salaried consumers. 

While only about 5 crore Indians have access to credit cards, UPI has become the country’s most widely adopted digital payment network. Credit Line on UPI can help bridge this access gap by bringing a credit card-like payment experience to UPI, helping unlock India’s next 50 million credit card users without requiring them to change how they already pay every day. 

Consumer behaviour during the initial launch period indicates responsible usage, with users relying on Kiwi Postpaid primarily for everyday UPI purchases rather than discretionary high-value expenses. Kiwi Postpaid has also seen strong approval efficiency, with nearly 95% of eligible applicants approved for a credit line within two hours. 

Siddharth Mehta, Co-Founder & COO of Kiwi, said, “For millions of Indians, UPI is already their primary way to pay, but credit cards have remained out of reach. The early adoption of Kiwi Postpaid shows that Credit Line on UPI can bridge this gap. We are seeing first-time credit card users, self-employed professionals and consumers from Tier II and III cities use Kiwi Postpaid for everyday spends. By bringing credit to the UPI ecosystem, we are making credit card-like access simpler, faster and more relevant for India’s next generation of consumers.” 

Speaking about the partnership, Mr. Anil Singh, Country Head, Credit Cards & Merchant Acquiring, YES BANK, said, “UPI has transformed India’s payment ecosystem and will continue to shape the industry across the country. Building on this momentum, YES BANK is committed to delivering best-in-class experience to the customers. Our partnership with Kiwi on UPI credit cards has shown strong adoption and highly positive customer response. With Kiwi Postpaid, we are extending credit lines on UPI to a broader set of customers by encouraging early traction among new-to-credit users and customers beyond Tier I cities. By leveraging our digital onboarding and underwriting capabilities, we aim to provide seamless, responsible access to credit at scale.” 

Kiwi Postpaid enables consumers to access credit lines of up to ₹50,000 through the Kiwi app and use them for everyday UPI payments across categories such as groceries, travel, dining and other daily expenses. The product, offered in partnership with YES BANK, is designed to help users access regulated credit while building and strengthening their credit profiles through timely repayment.

MENA Fintech Association Names Victor L. Philippe Chatenay and Haifa Al Obaid as Co Chairs of Its Saudi Arabia Chapter

Appointments bring together senior banking, digital assets and strategic finance expertise to advance fintech innovation and collaboration across the Kingdom

RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA | Aug 11 — The MENA Fintech Association (MFTA) today announced the appointment of Victor L. Philippe Chatenay and Haifa Al Obaid as Co Chairs of its Saudi Arabia Chapter. The appointments reflect MFTA’s continued commitment to strengthening the fintech ecosystem in the Kingdom, supporting Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 financial sector development goals, and fostering closer collaboration between regulators, financial institutions and fintech innovators.

As Co Chairs, Chatenay and Al Obaid will lead the Saudi Chapter’s strategic direction, working to expand MFTA’s local membership base, convene industry dialogue, and support initiatives that accelerate the growth of digital finance, payments and emerging financial infrastructure across Saudi Arabia.

“We are delighted to welcome Victor and Haifa as Co Chairs of our Saudi Arabia Chapter,” said Nameer Khan, Chair of the MENA Fintech Association. “Their combined experience across banking, regulation, digital assets and strategic finance gives our Saudi Chapter exceptional leadership at a pivotal moment for the Kingdom’s fintech sector.”