Key earnings to watch also include those of oil marketing companies (OMCs) Bharat Petroleum Corporation (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation (HPCL), as escalating tensions in the Middle East continue to push oil prices higher.

Two Adani Group companies—Adani Green Energy and Adani Power—will be in focus as they announce their Q1 results today. Other prominent companies feature IndusInd Bank, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories, HFCL, UCO Bank, Tata Communications, Waaree Renewable, Smartworks Coworking Spaces, NTPC Green Energy, Oracle Financial Services Software, JSW Energy, and IIFL Finance.

Recently listed Waterways Leisure Tourism, the operator of the Cordelia Cruises brand, is also scheduled to announce its maiden quarterly results as a listed company, alongside Aye Finance and several other firms.

The market reacted sharply on Wednesday to Q1 earnings announced a day earlier. Bandhan Bank shares plunged 10% to hit the lower circuit after the private lender cut its return on assets (RoA) guidance, citing an uncertain global macro environment and intensifying competition for deposits.

In contrast, Bajaj Auto and TVS Motor Company shares gained 3-4%, while Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services surged more than 5% after posting their June quarter results.

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Also read | Tata Group stock falls 2% after Q1 net profit jumps 18% to Rs 390 crore

Eternal Q1 preview

Zomato and Blinkit-parent Eternal is expected to report a steady June-quarter performance, with strong growth in quick commerce business likely to remain the main driver even as the food delivery business continues to expand at a slower but profitable pace.
Brokerages expect Eternal to benefit from higher order value in both food delivery and quick commerce. Blinkit is likely to see faster growth, helped by store additions, seasonal demand, IPL-related consumption and inflation-led basket expansion.Investors will watch Eternal’s commentary on competition intensity in quick commerce, Blinkit’s growth outlook, food delivery gross order value growth and margin trajectory.

Also read | LIVE updates on Q1 results

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

Mulberry has told Andy Burnham that scrapping the tourist tax would put more work through British factories, in the clearest sign yet that luxury manufacturers intend to test the new Prime Minister’s promise of growth beyond the M25.

Chief executive Andrea Baldo said restoring VAT-free shopping for overseas visitors should be ‘high on the agenda’ for the new Prime Minister, arguing it would support jobs across the country, including at the handbag maker’s own manufacturing hub in Somerset.

The intervention lands as Mulberry’s losses narrowed from £32.2 million to £8.9 million, after a turnaround refocused on the home market. Sales rose 4 per cent to £125.5 million for the 52 weeks to 28 March, from £120.4 million a year earlier. Shares rose 5.8 per cent to 145p on Wednesday morning.

Baldo said axing the tax, which hundreds of businesses including Primark, Harrods and Burberry have urged previous governments to scrap, would ‘unlock an opportunity…which helps all the cities of the UK.’ He pointed to Liverpool and Manchester as particular beneficiaries, as well as London.

That framing is pointed. Burnham has pledged to deliver ‘good growth in every postcode’ with policies shifting economic and political power away from Westminster, and has already used the tax system to signal intent, scrapping VAT on household electricity bills on his second day in office. Mulberry’s argument is that VAT-free shopping is a regional policy dressed up as a London one.

Why this matters beyond the West End

For smaller firms, the tourist tax debate has always been about supply chains rather than shop windows. One luxury brand’s UK sales support component suppliers, packaging firms, logistics operators and the hospitality businesses serving visiting shoppers well beyond Bond Street.

Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt scrapped VAT-free shopping, which allowed overseas visitors to reclaim 20 per cent on purchases. HMRC withdrew the VAT Retail Export Scheme from 1 January 2021, arguing the relief was costly and concentrated in the capital. European countries charge VAT but refund it to overseas visitors taking purchases home, leaving Britain an outlier.

Luxury firms have long called the loss an own-goal, hitting the UK economy while boosting sales in Paris and Milan, with some shifting investment towards China rather than London. Retail bosses have pressed successive chancellors on the same point, without success.

The Treasury’s resistance has been backed by the numbers-keepers. The Office for Budget Responsibility reviewed its costing of the abolition and concluded the measure was ‘unlikely to affect significantly the productive capacity of the economy’, a finding retailers dispute but have yet to dislodge.

The manufacturing argument

Baldo’s pitch is not simply about till receipts. There was a ‘great advantage’ in being able to offer tourists products manufactured in Britain, he said. Mulberry’s bags are made in Somerset.

‘Tourism is a big part of our business that we have completely neglected because of the situation in London’, he added.

‘I am sure that if we can unlock that, then we’re just going to produce more because people love the UK manufacturing story, and that’s obviously so important. So it’s connected. It’s not just trading retail, but it’s really truly connected with Somerset and the factories.’

The domestic recovery has been driven by lapsed customers returning for summery raffia bags and new versions of flagship lines such as the Bayswater. The relaunched Roxanne, first popular in the 2000s and now fronted by Wicked actress Cynthia Erivo, has pulled in old fans and Gen Z shoppers alike.

‘More than half of our retail and digital sales came from returning customers, demonstrating that we are winning back former clients who already know and love the Mulberry brand and the importance of regaining relevance in our home market in order to grow internationally,’ Baldo said.

The turnaround has leaned on reviving the firm’s ‘cool Britannia’ image from the 2010s, when ‘It girls’ such as Alexa Chung paraded its products. Distribution has widened through more concessions in John Lewis and Selfridges, and Baldo says the brand has found a ‘sweet spot’ in the £800 to £1,200 price range.

For firms further down the supply chain, the lesson is portable: a credible British-made story is worth paying for, and the customers most likely to buy it are the ones you have already sold to once.

Jamie Young

Jamie Young is Senior Reporter at Business Matters, covering SME finance, employment law and Westminster policy since 2016. He has reported on every Budget and Autumn Statement since 2018, helped make sense of the ‘covid era’ and the bounce-back loan scheme from launch through the fraud investigations, and broke the magazine’s coverage of the 2024 late-payment reforms. He joined Business Matters straight from completing his BA in Administration from Exeter University and is NCTJ-qualified. Reach him at jyoung@cbmeg.co.uk

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OpenAI announced Tuesday that one of its advanced artificial intelligence models autonomously hacked into another AI company’s infrastructure during internal testing in what it described as an “unprecedented cyber incident.”

The company said AI startup Hugging Face detected and contained the breach last week after an AI agent compromised part of its infrastructure. The companies said they believe it may be the first publicly disclosed case of an AI model breaking into another company’s systems on its own during a controlled evaluation.

OpenAI said the breach took place during an internal evaluation of several of its models, including GPT-5.6 Sol.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the incident in a post on X, writing that the company had “a significant security incident during evaluation of our models.”

OPENAI UNVEILS CHATGPT WORK TO AUTOMATE WORKPLACE TASKS AS AI RACE INTENSIFIES

OpenAI disclosed that one of its advanced artificial intelligence models compromised another company’s systems during an internal cybersecurity evaluation, calling it an “unprecedented cyber incident.” (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images / Getty Images)

“We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities, and are responding accordingly,” OpenAI said in a news release.

The company said it was releasing preliminary findings to help security professionals better understand the capabilities of today’s AI models while the investigation continues.

OpenAI warned that increasingly capable AI models are accelerating the discovery and exploitation of software vulnerabilities.

“The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities,” the company said. “We are strengthening the containment, monitoring, access controls, and evaluation practices used during model development.”

APPLE ACCUSES OPENAI OF TELLING RECRUITS TO BRING APPLE PROTOTYPES TO INTERVIEWS

OpenAI said one of its AI models compromised another company’s systems during internal testing, prompting a joint investigation with AI startup Hugging Face. (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic / Reuters)

Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clem Delangue also addressed the incident in a post on X.

“We suspected last week’s cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent. Turns out it did!” Delangue wrote.

“We’ve spent the past 24 hours working closely with the @OpenAI team (thanks!), and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part,” he continued. “It’s quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously! The investigation is ongoing, and we’ll share more learnings from what might be the first incident of its kind!”

JOHNS HOPKINS SURGEON HIGHLIGHTS AI BREAKTHROUGH THAT COULD SPOT PANCREATIC CANCER BEFORE DOCTORS

Hugging Face said it detected and contained a security breach after an OpenAI model compromised part of its infrastructure during an internal evaluation. (Jaque Silva/NurPhoto via Getty Images / Getty Images)

According to OpenAI, the incident took place during an internal evaluation designed to measure its AI models’ advanced cyber capabilities. Researchers disabled some built-in safety safeguards and ran the models in an isolated testing environment with limited internet access.

OpenAI said the models exploited an unknown software flaw to access the internet, then breached Hugging Face’s systems in an apparent attempt to find answers to a cybersecurity benchmark.

OpenAI’s security team detected the unusual activity while Hugging Face independently identified and contained the intrusion.

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Following the incident, OpenAI said it is implementing stricter security controls while vulnerabilities are patched and strengthening safeguards around future AI training and evaluations.

Félicie Burelle
CEO & Director

Good morning. Welcome, everybody. It’s my pleasure, alongside Olivier Dabi, our CFO; and Stephanie Laval, in charge of Strategic Planning and Investor Relations, to welcome you here in Levallois and remotely for those who are connected to present you our first half of the year 2026 results. And we are even more pleased to host you that we believe we have a solid set of figures to present to you this morning despite, as you know, a very complex environment we are surrounded with. And it’s always a pleasure for me to see such a video before beginning because you actually realize all the impact that we can have and the strong achievements we have made in the last few months.

I will actually start by coming back a bit on this complex market I was referring to because, as you know, last time we met was to present you the 2025 results. And we entered the 2026 year thinking that the market would be more or less flat, which, as you know, is not the case because today, the forecast for the 2026 year is minus 2.3%. Many reasons for that. The first one, as you know, we are still in this transformation of the automotive market, led principally by the electrification and technology-driven, but also because there are many other events throughout the world that are impacting the market.

This article was written by

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SEOUL — South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI index briefly surged past the 7,000-point mark on Tuesday before surrendering most of its gains in afternoon trading, as investors booked profits ahead of Alphabet’s earnings report and amid mounting geopolitical risk in the Middle East.

The index climbed as high as roughly 7,100 during the session before pulling back to close at 6,797.70, up 49.75 points, or 0.74%, from the previous trading day, according to the Korea Exchange. The tech-heavy Kosdaq index moved in the opposite direction, closing at 751.09, down 2.25 points, or 0.30%.

A volatile session

Tuesday’s trading was marked by sharp early-session volatility. A rapid surge in the KOSPI200 futures index triggered a temporary five-minute suspension of program buy orders, known as a “buy sidecar,” at around 9:06 a.m. local time. At the moment the suspension activated, the futures index stood at 1,139.3, up 58.46 points, or 5.4%, from the previous day’s close. The trigger marked the twentieth such buy-sidecar activation so far this year, reflecting an unusually turbulent stretch for Korean equities in 2026.

Despite touching the 7,000 threshold intraday, the index was unable to hold those gains, closing well below that level as retail and institutional investors moved to lock in profits during the afternoon session.

Who was buying and selling

Foreign investors were the primary source of buying pressure Tuesday, posting net purchases of 2.6223 trillion won. That buying was offset by selling from domestic investors, with individual traders posting net sales of 1.2278 trillion won and institutions selling a net 1.3868 trillion won.

What drove the pullback

Analysts attributed the retreat from the day’s highs to a combination of factors. Investors appeared to be shifting toward a more cautious, wait-and-see posture ahead of Alphabet’s upcoming earnings report, given the outsized role artificial intelligence-related spending has played in driving global equity markets this year. That caution was compounded by renewed geopolitical risk tied to instability in the Middle East, along with the burden of rising oil prices on broader market sentiment.

Sector performance

Trading was mixed across sectors on Tuesday. Telecommunications led gains, rising 5.08%, followed by construction, up 4.62%; transport equipment and parts, up 3.02%; machinery and equipment, up 2.2%; and general services, up 2%.

On the losing side, medical and precision instruments fell sharply, down 6.48%, while textiles and apparel dropped 1.27%, pharmaceuticals fell 1.18%, food, beverage and tobacco slipped 0.55%, and securities declined 0.44%.

Part of a broader rally in 2026

Tuesday’s session capped a volatile but broadly positive year for South Korean equities. The KOSPI has been on an extraordinary run over the past 18 months, having surged past the 6,000-point mark earlier this year in a rally fueled largely by technology and semiconductor stocks. That advance followed a 76% gain the previous year, which itself marked the index’s strongest annual performance since 1999.

Momentum through the year has been driven in large part by investor optimism around artificial intelligence and record-setting performance from Korea’s chipmaking giants. Samsung Electronics, the country’s largest listed company, unveiled its next-generation HBM4 memory chip earlier this week as part of an effort to strengthen its position in the AI accelerator market, a sector where South Korean semiconductor firms have played an increasingly central role globally.

A market prone to sharp swings

Even with the index’s strong multiyear trajectory, 2026 has been marked by significant volatility. The KOSPI’s 52-week trading range has spanned from roughly 3,079 to 9,385, according to market data, reflecting a year of dramatic swings driven by shifting sentiment around AI investment, geopolitical developments and global monetary policy.

The index’s climb toward 7,000 this week continues a pattern seen throughout the year, in which strong rallies driven by foreign buying and optimism around chip demand have frequently been followed by rapid pullbacks as investors reassess valuations or respond to external shocks.

What investors are watching next

Market participants are now looking ahead to Alphabet’s earnings report, widely seen as an early bellwether for how markets will interpret AI-related capital spending trends heading into the back half of the year. Continued developments in the Middle East, along with their impact on oil prices, are also likely to remain a key factor shaping investor sentiment in the sessions ahead.

South Korean policymakers, meanwhile, have continued pursuing broader reforms aimed at deepening the country’s capital markets and increasing international participation, part of a longer-term effort to support valuations and improve liquidity across Korean equities. Whether Tuesday’s pullback from record territory proves to be a temporary pause or the start of a more sustained period of consolidation is likely to become clearer as upcoming corporate earnings, both in Korea and internationally, provide further signals on the health of the AI-driven rally that has powered much of this year’s gains.