Ceigall India shares rose as much as 3.54% to hit an intraday high of Rs 359.85 on Friday after the company received a Letter of Intent (LoI) from REC Power Development and Consultancy Limited for a major power transmission project.

The order marks a significant addition to Ceigall India’s project pipeline, with the total project cost estimated at around Rs 5,300 crore, including GST.

Under the LoI, Ceigall India will undertake the “Common Transmission System for evacuation of power from Lakadia (Phase-II: 7.5 GW), Jam Khambhaliya (Phase-II: 5.5 GW) and Jamnagar (Phase-I: 1 GW) – Part-B” project.

The project involves developing a 765/400 kV AIS substation along with around 300 km of transmission lines under a tariff-based contract agreement.

The company will have 36 months to execute the project, followed by an operational period of 35 years from the scheduled commissioning date.

The project carries annual transmission charges of Rs 608.67 crore for 35 years, according to the company’s disclosure.
Ceigall India said the order was awarded by a domestic entity and confirmed that neither the promoter/promoter group nor group companies have any interest in REC Power Development and Consultancy. The contract also does not fall under related-party transactions.The latest order strengthens Ceigall India’s presence in the power transmission space and adds a sizeable long-term project to its order pipeline. The combination of a large project cost and a 35-year operational period provides the company with significant visibility over the project lifecycle.

Share price and technical indicators

Following the announcement, Ceigall India shares climbed nearly 4%, reflecting investor interest in the sizeable transmission opportunity. The company currently has a market capitalisation of Rs 6,081 crore, while its 52-week high stands at Rs 405.70.

On the technical front, Ceigall India’s 14-day Relative Strength Index (RSI) stood at 61.0, indicating positive momentum. An RSI below 30 is generally considered oversold, while a reading above 70 signals overbought conditions.

The stock’s technical setup remains bullish, with Ceigall India trading above all eight of its key Simple Moving Averages (SMAs).

(Disclaimer: Recommendations, suggestions, views and opinions given by the experts are their own. These do not represent the views of The Economic Times.)

PhysicsWallah shares surged more than 4%, touching an intraday high of Rs 126.75 on the National Stock Exchange (NSE) in early trade on Friday after Motilal Oswal initiated coverage on the education technology company with a ‘Buy’ rating and a target price of Rs 200.

Motilal Oswal’s target price implies an upside of about 66% from its reference price of Rs 121. The brokerage described PhysicsWallah as one of India’s most capital-efficient education platforms, supported by its low-cost customer-acquisition model, affordable courses, and expanding online and offline presence.

Over the past month, PhysicsWallah shares declined 1.05%. Despite the recent rally following Motilal Oswal’s bullish coverage, the stock remains marginally negative on a one-month basis.

Key financial estimates and valuations

Motilal Oswal expects PhysicsWallah’s revenue to increase from Rs 3,899.4 crore in FY26 to Rs 4,944.4 crore in FY27 and Rs 6,138.9 crore in FY28. This represents projected growth of 26.8% in FY27 and 24.2% in FY28.
EBITDA is estimated to rise from Rs 548.6 crore in FY26 to Rs 993.2 crore in FY27 and Rs 1,400.1 crore in FY28. The EBITDA margin is projected to expand from 14.1% to 20.1% and 22.8%, respectively.

The brokerage expects the company to swing from an adjusted loss of Rs 24.8 crore in FY26 to a profit of Rs 313.4 crore in FY27. Adjusted profit is projected to rise further to Rs 575.5 crore in FY28. Unique transacting users are expected to increase from 4.9 million in FY26 to 7 million by FY28.
At the brokerage’s reference price, PhysicsWallah is valued at 110 times estimated FY27 earnings and 59.9 times FY28 earnings. Its EV-to-EBITDA multiple is projected to decline from 34.2 times in FY27 to 23.8 times in FY28.Using a sum-of-the-parts valuation, Motilal Oswal valued the online business at Rs 172 per share, based on 50 times FY28 EBITDA. It assigned Rs 4 per share to the offline business, Rs 1 to other businesses and Rs 20 to cash, arriving at a rounded target price of Rs 200.

Differentiated CAC moat

PhysicsWallah’s free-to-paid funnel is anchored by more than 100 million YouTube subscribers and over 83 million app downloads. This allows students to discover the platform organically, keeping marketing expenditure at about 4% of revenue, below several peers, and lowering customer-acquisition costs, the brokerage firm said.

Online dominance

The online business had 4.9 million paying users in FY26, with average revenue per user of Rs 4,104. Motilal Oswal expects online revenue to grow at about 28% annually between FY26 and FY30, supported by user additions, entry into new categories, and AI-led monetisation.

Offline scalability

PhysicsWallah expanded its offline network from 28 centres in FY23 to 353 in FY26. Around 80% of offline admissions originate from its online learner base, reducing the need to build demand from scratch in each market. Motilal Oswal expects offline revenue to grow at about 20% annually through FY30 and its pre-Ind AS EBITDA margin to reach 3% by FY28 as centres mature.

The brokerage firm also noted intense competition from established coaching institutes and digital-first platforms, weak utilisation or execution at offline centres, and an elevated employee attrition rate of around 28%. Slower adaptation to AI-led learning, higher student dropouts, faculty availability, poor academic outcomes, reputational issues, and adverse changes in regulations governing coaching, advertising or data privacy could also affect growth and profitability.

Disclosure: This article has been written by [Somanjali Das], who is not a SEBI-registered Research Analyst or an investment advisor. [Somanjali Das] does not hold any financial interest in [PhysicsWallah] as of the date of publication. The views/recommendations mentioned in this article, wherever applicable, are those of the respective SEBI-registered Research Analyst/brokerage and have been reproduced/reported with due attribution. They should not be construed as the views or recommendations of the EconomicTimes Digital or the journalist. Readers are advised to consider the original research report and make their investment.

The Research Analyst is [Abhishek Pathak]. The RA is registered with SEBI under registration number [INH000000412]. The RA does not hold any financial interest in the [Physicswallah].

Itch.io, the popular independent game distribution platform, experienced a widespread outage early Friday morning, with users reporting problems accessing the site starting around 2:54 a.m. EDT.

According to outage-tracking site Downdetector, complaints began surfacing shortly after 2:40 a.m., with reports climbing steadily throughout the early morning hours. The itch.io account itself acknowledged the disruption in a post shared through Downdetector’s platform, asking affected users how the outage was impacting them and directing people to the site’s live outage dashboard for updates. The hashtag “ItchIoDown” began circulating on social media as users compared notes on the disruption.

By later in the morning, independent status-tracking service Instatus reported that itch.io remained down, with 35 separate outage reports logged and tracked as part of a 12-hour history chart monitoring the site’s availability. The continued reports throughout the morning suggested the disruption was not a brief, momentary blip but rather a more sustained period of downtime affecting the platform.

Itch.io, launched in March 2013 by founder Leaf Corcoran, has grown into one of the internet’s most widely used platforms for hosting, selling and distributing independent video games, along with indie role-playing games, game development assets, comics, zines and music. The site hosts more than 1 million products, according to figures compiled as of late 2024, and has become a particularly important hub for smaller, independent developers who use the platform both to sell finished games and to host game jams, time-limited events in which participants create new games or other creative projects within a set window.

This is not the first time itch.io has experienced significant service disruptions. According to discussions on the platform’s own community forums, itch.io suffered an unplanned outage last year that the site’s administrators attributed to a distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attack, an incident that frustrated developers attempting to upload new content to the platform during the disruption. One developer, describing the experience on itch.io’s community forum, recounted repeated failures using the platform’s file-upload tool, known as Butler, during large uploads, describing the frustration of watching an upload fail near completion due to the site’s instability.

“Because the site keeps going up and down, butler fails regularly on larger uploads,” the developer wrote at the time, adding that they were also unable to upload images for devlogs or associated cover art during the outage.

That same developer, along with others in the itch.io community, has previously called on the platform to establish a dedicated, official status page similar to those maintained by larger technology companies, allowing users to quickly verify whether an outage is affecting the site broadly rather than relying solely on social media updates. According to a response from an itch.io administrator on the platform’s forum, the company currently relies on Discord, Twitter and Bluesky to share off-site status updates during outages, rather than maintaining a dedicated status page of its own.

“Discord, Twitter, and Bluesky are the only places we post off-site status updates like that,” the itch.io administrator wrote in response to community requests for a more centralized status-tracking system, adding that the prior year’s DDoS-related downtime had been unplanned, meaning there would not have been any way to warn users of the disruption ahead of time even with such a system in place.

Itch.io’s history of intermittent outages extends beyond the DDoS-related incident. Community forum posts dating back to at least September 2025 reference multiple recurring outages affecting the platform, with one moderator confirming to a user asking about repeated access issues that “there have been multiple outages recently.” Separately, at least one prior outage affecting itch.io in June was tied to broader infrastructure issues affecting Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that provides content delivery and security services to a significant portion of websites globally, illustrating how itch.io’s reliability, like that of many websites, can be affected by disruptions originating outside its own direct infrastructure.

For developers who rely on itch.io as a primary distribution channel for their games and other creative work, outages of this kind can carry meaningful practical consequences, particularly when they interfere with time-sensitive uploads tied to game jam deadlines or planned product launches. The platform’s role as a hub for smaller, independent creators, many of whom may not have access to the same level of technical support or infrastructure redundancy as larger commercial game publishers, has made reliability concerns a recurring topic of discussion within itch.io’s community forums over the past year.

As of Friday morning, itch.io had not published a detailed public explanation addressing the specific cause of the latest disruption, consistent with the platform’s general pattern of providing limited technical detail during active outages. Affected users were directed to monitor the company’s Discord server and social media accounts, including Bluesky and X, for updates, given the absence of a dedicated, centralized status page.

Independent monitoring services tracking itch.io’s availability in real time, including BlockedOrDown and Downdetector, continued logging the platform’s status throughout the morning, cross-referencing automated server checks with crowdsourced user reports to help distinguish between a genuine, widescale outage and more localized connectivity issues affecting only a subset of users.

As of Friday late morning, it remained unclear how long the disruption would persist or what specifically had caused the latest outage affecting the platform. Developers and users hoping to upload or access content on itch.io were advised to wait for confirmation that the site had returned to normal operation before attempting large file uploads, given the platform’s documented history of upload failures during periods of server instability.

Gary Lineker has renewed his call for a wealth tax on the super wealthy, asking how much money the very richest “actually need” and predicting heavy lobbying against any such measure from those who would pay it.

The former footballer and Match of the Day presenter, 65, is one of more than 120 UK millionaires who signed an open letter organised by Patriotic Millionaires UK urging the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, to introduce a 2 per cent wealth tax on assets exceeding £10 million.

Speaking on Davina McCall’s Begin Again podcast on Thursday, Lineker said there comes a point in a person’s life “where you have a wealth” and can “perhaps contribute to society”. He acknowledged that anyone can already pay more voluntarily, but argued that this misses the point. “I think if you can get it as a kind of law that the super wealthy contribute more to society, it would make sense,” he said.

The open letter to Mr Burnham, published in July, was covered by Business Matters when millionaires urged the new Prime Minister to tax their wealth, and prompted a public rejection of the idea from the broadcaster James May.

“Will they really leave over 0.2 per cent of their wealth?”

Lineker took aim at the argument that a wealth tax would drive the richest out of the country. “Especially when you’re talking about obviously super wealthy, like the billionaires, and you think, well, and they say, well, they’ll just leave the country. Will they really over like 0.2 per cent of their wealth? I mean, would they? Why? And you just think, well, would you want those kind of people in the country?”

He said a higher bill “wouldn’t really make any difference” to the individuals concerned, and compared the accumulation of assets among the super wealthy to a crude game of one-upmanship in which they measure themselves against each other.

“As someone that’s pretty wealthy, I’ve always been a contributor to tax,” he said. “I’ve always paid top, top-level tax and for a long, long, long time, and happy to do so. And then, if they want us to dip in, I think most of us would like to help in a way. So we’ll see if the government does that. There’d be a lot of lobbying against it, of course, from the super wealthy.”

Lineker’s intervention has drawn sharp criticism from opponents who point to his own tax history. Court documents show that HMRC began pursuing him for outstanding tax in 2019, when he was earning more than £1.7 million a year as the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, and that he resisted demands for £3.62 million in income tax and £1.31 million in National Insurance over his television work between 2013 and 2018.

HMRC argued that he should have been classed as an employee of the BBC and BT Sport, where he presented Uefa Champions League coverage. He was instead paid as a contractor through Gary Lineker Media, a partnership set up in 2012 with his then wife Danielle Bux, which allowed him to be paid partly in dividends at a lower corporation tax rate. He has said that all taxes were paid on the income.

HMRC pursued the case under the IR35 rules designed to tackle so-called disguised employment. After a three-day tribunal in London, a judge ruled in Lineker’s favour in 2023, finding that he was a freelancer with direct contracts with both broadcasters. HMRC appealed but settled the case in 2024.

Around 20 years earlier, Lineker was among a number of stars who put at least £100,000 each into film investment schemes run by Ingenious Media, which offered large tax breaks to investors. Publicly available records show he was a member of a series of limited liability partnerships set up by the firm between 2003 and 2007 that helped to finance films including The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Life of Pi and Avatar. In 2016 HMRC said the schemes amounted to “tax avoidance” because they sought to use “artificial losses” to avoid millions of pounds in tax. In 2017, leaked documents suggested he had avoided stamp duty on the sale of a luxury home in Barbados because it was bought through an offshore company.

“If he wants to pay more tax he could sign a cheque”

Andrew Griffith, the Conservative shadow business secretary, said: “If self-righteous preaching was an Olympic sport, millionaire crisp salesman Gary Lineker would win gold. It beggars belief that he would spend his time on elaborate tax avoidance schemes whilst lecturing others on why they should pay more tax. As per usual for out of touch celebrities, it’s one rule for him and another for everyone else.”

Robert Jenrick MP, Reform’s Treasury spokesman, said: “Gary Lineker’s hypocrisy is breathtaking. If he wants to pay more tax he could sign a cheque to the Treasury tomorrow. But he won’t because he’s spent years trying to pay as little tax as possible on his taxpayer-funded income.”

Charlie Dewhirst, the Conservative MP, said: “This is the kind of gross hypocrisy we’ve come to expect from Gary Lineker. If he is so desperate for everyone else to pay more, why did he bother battling HMRC for five years to save himself millions of pounds in extra tax?”

Maxwell Marlow, director at the Adam Smith Institute, described the call as “nothing but an absurd PR stunt”. He said: “If Gary and his dinner party chums want to pay more tax, they are welcome to do so by speaking to HMRC, preferably out of a courtroom.”

Lineker himself acknowledged on the podcast that wealthy individuals can already pay more if they choose, saying “we all do stuff with charities and things like that”, but insisted that a statutory requirement on the super wealthy to contribute more “would make sense”.

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