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Mumbai: The primary market is set for another busy week, with six mainboard and four SME initial public offerings (IPOs) scheduled to open for subscription, collectively seeking to raise more than ₹3,533 crore. This compares with ₹7,100 crore raised through seven mainboard and two SME IPOs last week.

Among the mainboard offerings, Symbiotec Pharmalab will be the largest, looking to raise around ₹1,757 crore. Lumino Industries and Skyways Air Services will follow, seeking to raise around ₹700 crore and ₹583 crore, respectively. Annu Projects and Hy-Tech Engineers will raise around ₹175 crore and ₹136 crore, respectively. Priority Jewels’ IPO will open on August 28 and close on September 1. Details of the issue have yet to be announced.

Two mainboard IPOs that opened for subscription last week – Augmont Enterprises and Tempsens Instruments India – will close this week. Five companies will also make their stock-market debuts, including Lalithaa Jewellery Mart, Horizon Industrial Parks, Sunshine Pictures, Shankesh Jewellers and Gaja Alternative Asset Management.

The SME segment will see four IPOs open for subscription this week. Kwick Forensic Solutions, Sumax Engineering, ABH Healthcare and Madhur Knit Crafts will collectively raise around ₹183 crore. Two SME companies, Dhanwel Hybrid Seeds and Mopshop Distribution, are also scheduled to list on the exchanges this week.

Read more: Sebi turns down Adani-linked FPIs’ settlement applications

The IPO pipeline has remained strong through August. So far this month, 20 mainboard IPOs have hit the market, raising around ₹20,850 crore, while 18 SME IPOs have collectively raised more than ₹941 crore. So far in 2026, 59 companies have raised around ₹72,000 crore through IPOs, underscoring the continued strength of primary-market activity.

At first glance, the headline number out of Southeast Asia’s aviation market this August looks reassuring. 

Total scheduled seat capacity edged up to 51 million, a modest 0.8% gain over the same month last year. In an industry still shadowed by fuel volatility and geopolitical friction, “growth” of any size tends to be read as good news. 

But sit with the underlying figures for more than a moment, and a more interesting, and less comfortable, picture emerges. 

This is not a region firing on all cylinders. It is a region bifurcating, with a handful of national carriers and a couple of standout markets doing the heavy lifting while much of the rest tread water or slide backward.

A market of winners and laggards, not a rising tide

Break the 0.8% headline figure down by country, and the “growth” story becomes a story about two economies: Indonesia and Vietnam. Indonesia holds its position as the region’s largest market, with capacity climbing past 11 million seats. 

Vietnam is the standout performer, its seat count rising by roughly 10% year on year, the fastest expansion among the top five markets, driven in large part by Vietnam Airlines, which posted an 8.2% increase and comfortably retained its title as the region’s busiest carrier.

Contrast that with Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, all three of which lost seats compared with last August. It is tempting to write this off as noise. Airline capacity fluctuates seasonally, and route-by-route decisions rarely tell a coherent macro story on their own. 

But three of the region’s five largest economies contracting in the same month that two others expand sharply suggests something structural rather than incidental: diverging cost bases, diverging currency pressure, and diverging exposure to the knock on effects of turmoil further afield, notably the Middle East, where regional jet fuel costs and the broader cost of living appear to be denting appetite for travel and route economics alike.

The budget airline retreat deserves more attention than it’s getting

Perhaps the most consequential trend buried in this month’s numbers is the quiet retrenchment of the region’s low-cost carriers. Mainline airlines now control 56% of Southeast Asian capacity, having grown nearly 6% year on year, while low-cost carriers contracted by almost 5%, ceding market share that had taken the better part of two decades to build. AirAsia, long the poster child of Southeast Asian budget aviation, cut capacity by 17%. Thai AirAsia cut deeper still, down 23%. Between the two, well over 900,000 seats simply vanished from the schedule compared with a year ago.

This matters beyond the balance sheets of two airlines. Southeast Asia’s aviation boom of the past fifteen years was substantially a budget carrier story: cheap, high-frequency point-to-point flying that stitched together an archipelago of emerging middle-class economies and made intra-regional travel a routine affair rather than a luxury. 

A meaningful and sustained retreat by the LCC sector, even as one bright exception, Indonesia’s Citilink, up a startling 73%, proves the model can still work under the right ownership and cost structure, raises a genuine question about affordability. 

If budget capacity keeps shrinking while mainline carriers pick up the slack, average fares in the region are likely to drift upward, with consequences for tourism-dependent economies from the Mekong Delta to the Philippine archipelago that have built growth strategies around low-cost connectivity.

Airports are not immune to the split, either

The airport data tells a parallel story of unevenness. Singapore Changi remains comfortably the region’s busiest hub, growing a healthy 3.5%, and Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh City are close behind with solid gains. 

Hanoi is the standout, up over 12%, further evidence that Vietnam’s aviation sector is currently the region’s clearest growth engine. But Bangkok Don Mueang, Manila and Kuala Lumpur all shrank, echoing the national level contractions in Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia.

Airport capacity, in other words, is simply following the money, and right now the money is concentrating in Jakarta, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Singapore rather than spreading evenly across the region’s traditional hub cities.

What this means going forward

None of this amounts to a crisis. A 0.8% expansion, however uneven its distribution, is still expansion, and international long-haul demand to Europe and North America, up 10.8% and 9% respectively, suggests confidence in Southeast Asia as an origin and destination market remains intact where it counts most for revenue. 

But the aggregate numbers are masking a market that is quietly reorganizing itself: budget carriers ceding ground to full-service airlines, growth concentrating in Vietnam and Indonesia while Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines stall, and cost pressure from outside the region, particularly the Middle East, beginning to show up in route-level decisions. 

Anyone reading only the top-line seat count this month is reading half the story. The more consequential shifts are happening beneath it.

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Minimalist retractable door handles became a signature feature of electric vehicles (EVs), but the controversial designs are now at the centre of China’s biggest car recall, affecting more than 4 million vehicles.

The recall, which includes 2.98 million Chinese-made Teslas, follows safety concerns that the hidden door handles are difficult to locate and open in emergency situations.

Other brands affected by the recall include Chinese carmakers XPeng, Xiaomi and Geely.

Made popular by multi-billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla, hidden door handles are designed to tuck seamlessly within the car’s door panel and only extend outwards approaches their vehicle.

The design came under scrutiny after two fatal crashes in China involving Xiaomi EVs, in which power failures were suspected to have prevented doors from being opened.

Tesla said in a statement on Friday that it was recalling some of its Model 3, Y, S and X vehicles due to door handles that are “difficult to identify and operate because their colour is similar to the interior trim”.

This could hinder occupants or rescuers from quickly opening the doors in an emergency, such as during a “severe collision causing the vehicle’s low-voltage system to fail.”

Tesla said it will place warning labels on the recalled vehicles and issue a software update to automatically lower a vehicle’s windows after a collision.

It is not clear if the affected firms plan to make a similar recall for the rest of the world.

The BBC has contacted Tesla, XPeng, Xiaomi and Geely for comment.

In February, Chinese authorities announced a ban on hidden door handles.

Under new rules due to take effect on 1 January 2027, cars will only be allowed to be sold in China if they have a mechanical release on both the inside and outside of their doors.

Tesla’s door handles were also involved in a probe by US safety regulators after reports that they suddenly stopped working, leaving children trapped in the cars.

In July, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration suggested creating a new formal safety standard for all carmakers.

The BBC has contacted the agency for comment.