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Economic Times
6 minutes ago
- Economic Times
India scours the globe for more oil ahead of Trump-Putin summit
India's refiners are diversifying crude oil sources amid potential US pressure to curb Russian imports, spurred by President Trump's demands and tariff hikes. State processors are actively purchasing non-Russian crude from various global markets for September-October delivery. While private refiners may continue Russian imports, concerns over secondary sanctions are pushing some to explore alternative payment methods and smaller banks. Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Tired of too many ads? Remove Ads Refiners in India, the world's top importer of seaborne Russian crude, are scouring the globe for alternative supplies, hedging their bets ahead of a summit between the US and Russian Donald Trump, eager to gain traction in talks with Vladimir Putin, has demanded that India stop purchases of cut-price crude that fuels the Kremlin's 'the war machine,' and last week doubled tariffs on the country's goods as punishment. The move left refiners in the world's third-largest oil consumer looking to switch up their procurement state processors have bought large volumes of non-Russian crude this week for prompt September-October delivery, extending a buying spree spurred by an early threat by Washington. Indian Oil Corp . and Bharat Petroleum Corp . have taken cargoes from all corners of the market including the US, but also Brazil and the Middle spot market purchases comes on top of supplies from long-term sellers like Saudi Arabia, which is set to send about 22.5 million barrels of crude to India for September loading, traders said. India's monthly imports from Saudi last exceeded that level in September 2024, according to data from analytics firm meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska on Friday will be closely watched by the industry, eager for clues as to whether the US will ease pressure on Russian sales — or crank it up. India has long had close ties to Russia and Foreign Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar will be traveling to Moscow next week with a delegation that's likely to include Petroleum Secretary Pankaj Jain, the most senior bureaucrat in the oil will hold talks with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on Aug. 21, according to a post on X by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs on India has not been a significant importer of Russian crude, depending more heavily on the Middle East. All that changed in 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine and a $60-per-barrel price cap imposed by the Group of Seven nations that aimed to limit the Kremlin's oil revenues while keeping supplies flowing imports amounted to about 1.7 million barrels a day, or nearly 37% of the nation's overseas purchases, in mid-2025. They were mostly of Urals crude, a medium-density grade that can be interchanged with barrels from across the Middle East. While the total volume that India would need to find as replacement is significant, the task has been made less challenging in a market awash with oil after the return of OPEC+ barrels and softer demand from major economies such as now, Indian private refiners such as Reliance Industries Ltd. and Nayara Energy are still expected to continue buying Russian crude, some of which is procured via term contracts, even as state refiners hold back on spot purchases for loading in producers have already started to tout Urals more aggressively to Chinese buyers in response to the potential shift. Prices have been cut for offers of Urals for delivery in September to October, suggesting some of the oil was diverted from Indian importers who still want to take Russian crude are being met with hesitation from banking and logistics partners worried about the prospect of Trump's threat of so-called secondary sanctions on those supporting the trade. In light of such reservations, traders said some private players may increasingly look at buying more Russian crude using smaller banks, Chinese yuan and dark-fleet has warned he would impose 'very severe consequences' if Putin doesn't agree to a deal later this week, a threat that the oil market will struggle to fully quantify and prepare for. Oil-market observers have said that the Chinese may be wary of piling in on Russian crude — taking supplies that it doesn't desperately need due to ample flows from Iran — to avoid Washington's wrath.
Mint
9 minutes ago
- Mint
AI agents are turning Salesforce and SAP into rivals
ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE is an unlikely source of hubbub. Bringing up CRM or ERP in conversation has usually been a reliable way to be left alone. But not these days, especially if you are chatting to a tech investor. Mention the acronyms—for customer-relationship management, which automates front-office tasks like dealing with clients, and enterprise resource planning, which does the same for back-office processes such as managing a firm's finances or supply chains—and you will set pulses racing. Between June and early December 2024 Salesforce, the 26-year-old global CRM giant, created more than $120bn in shareholder value, lifting its market capitalisation to a record $352bn. In the past 12 months SAP, a German tech titan which more or less invented ERP in the 1970s, has generated more. It is Europe's most valuable company, worth $380bn, likewise an all-time high. Both enterprise champions rank among the world's top ten software companies by value. Maybe not so dull, after all? The source of the excitement is another, much sexier acronym: AI. Builders of clever artificial-intelligence models may get all the attention; this week Elon Musk's xAI hogged the headlines when it was reported that the startup was launching a $300m share sale that would value it at $113bn. But if the technology is to be as revolutionary as boosters claim, it will in the first instance be because businesses use it to radically improve productivity. And as anyone who has tried—and probably failed—to replace corporate computer systems will tell you, they are likely to do so with the assistance of their current IT vendors. Salesforce and SAP each believes it will be the one ushering its clients into the AI age. The trouble is that many of those clients use both firms' products. Perhaps nine in ten Fortune 500 firms run Salesforce software. The same share relies on SAP. This did not matter when the duo focused on their respective bread and butter. A client would run Salesforce's second-to-none CRM in the front office and SAP's first-rate ERP in the back. Amazon and Walmart, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, BMW and Toyota: pick a household name and the odds are it does just that. A big reason for SAP and Salesforce to slather a thick layer of AI on top of their existing offering, though, is to give customers a way to uncurdle their data, analyse it and, with the help of semi-autonomous AI agents interacting with one another on behalf of their human managers, act on it. In this newly blended world, the lines between front and back office are fudged. 'It's one user experience," sums up Irfan Khan, SAP's data-and-analytics chief. Controlling the user interface for this 'agentic" AI experience promises fat profits. It also creates a head-to-head rivalry between the two enterprise masterchefs. For their AI recipes look alike. Step one: expand your range of products. SAP has improved its front-office chops by buying CRM firms (like CallidusCloud) and marketing platforms (such as Emarsys). Though Salesforce has not gone full-ERP, it has a 16-year-old partnership with Certinia, whose financial-management system sits exclusively atop its platform. It has bought firms like ClickSoftware, which helps businesses manage their service workforce. On June 2nd it hired the team behind MoonHub, a recruitment-and-HR startup. Clients, spared from switching between providers for every specialist function, love it. So do SAP and Salesforce, since it amasses more client data, AI's great leavener, in their own systems. Step two: piggyback on the 'hyperscalers". This allows clients to choose between the cloud giants, including, in China, Alibaba and Tencent (and, in Salesforce's case, excluding Microsoft, with which its co-founder and boss, Marc Benioff, has a long-running feud). It saves SAP and Salesforce from splurging on what each sees as infrastructure destined for 'commoditisation". Oracle, the giant of corporate-database management which has taken the opposite approach, has seen its quarterly capital budget explode from $400m in 2020 to nearly $6bn in its latest quarter; SAP and Salesforce spend $300m-400m a quarter between them. Step three: whip up the AI layer. In February SAP teamed up with Databricks, a $60bn AI startup, to help clients make sense of their information, including that stored outside SAP systems, and deploy SAP's Joule AI agents across their operations. On May 27th Salesforce said it would pay $8bn for Informatica, which designs tools to integrate and crunch corporate data. This will make its own Agentforce easier for clients to use beyond the front office. Right now investors prefer what SAP is serving up. Its systems cover a wider range of functions and thus contain more data. This data is also notoriously hard for non-SAP systems to extract. As annoying as this may be for clients, it gives them an incentive to look from inside the SAP platform out rather than the other way round. SAP's share price has risen by 12% in the past six months. Meanwhile, Salesforce's has collapsed like a bad soufflé. It is down by nearly 30% since its peak in early December. Although its sales passed those of SAP in 2023, growth is slowing while SAP's accelerates. Analysts wonder if Agentforce, the launch of which fuelled last year's rally, can make real money. They also fear a return to profligate dealmaking that culminated with the $28bn purchase in 2021 of Slack, a corporate-messaging platform. Too many cooks Investors could yet sour on SAP just as they have on Salesforce. Gartner, a research firm, reckons that between 2020 and 2024 rivals like Workday cut its share of the ERP business from 21% to 14%. For all its front-office efforts, its CRM sales declined around that time, even as Salesforce preserved its 20% slice of a growing market. Microsoft, which has its own cloud, its own cutting-edge AI and plenty of business clients, is elbowing its way into ERP, as well as CRM. The enterprise-AI food fight is just beginning. Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
Mint
16 minutes ago
- Mint
Barry Eichengreen: Trump's trade offensive echoes Thatcher's Falklands War
Next Story Barry Eichengreen Quick surrenders abound. China, Brazil and Canada may have stood firm, but it's a surprise how many US trade partners have taken Trump's trade aggression lying down. The EU's case glares out. Did it calculate that tit-for-tat tariffs would be self-damaging? Something that US President Donald Trump's trade war and Thatcher's Falklands War have in common is their utility in distracting attention from their instigators' domestic problems. Gift this article US President Donald Trump's trade war resembles nothing so much as UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War in 1982: one side deploys massive force and the other withdraws with its tail between its legs. Of 57 countries and territories included in Trump's 'Liberation Day' list of targets for 'reciprocal' tariffs, just three—Brazil, Canada and China—credibly threatened retaliation. US President Donald Trump's trade war resembles nothing so much as UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War in 1982: one side deploys massive force and the other withdraws with its tail between its legs. Of 57 countries and territories included in Trump's 'Liberation Day' list of targets for 'reciprocal' tariffs, just three—Brazil, Canada and China—credibly threatened retaliation. The Heard and McDonald Islands, populated only by penguins, were understandably supine. But it is more than a little surprising that so many others have taken US aggression lying down. Also Read: The EU needn't have yielded to the US on a trade deal The European Commission's agreement with the US is especially stunning. It has accepted Trump's 15% baseline tariff, with exemptions only for aircraft parts, critical minerals and a couple of other items. US duties on steel, copper and aluminium remain at 50%. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged that Europe will buy additional US energy and invest $600 billion in the US. In return, the EU receives basically nothing, only a US promise not to impose still higher tariffs, at least for now. Moreover, the deal enhances US exporters' access to European markets, while Europe's exporters face additional barriers in the US. The outcome is widely seen as a sign of the EU's weakness. The Commission had to negotiate an agreement on behalf of 27 countries with different positions on how aggressively Europe should respond. In France, there was considerable support for the idea that it was important to face down a bully. In Germany, by contrast, policy was shaped by automotive and machinery industries desperate to retain access to the US market on terms at least not grossly inferior to those obtained by Japan, South Korea and the UK. These differences left the Commission with little wiggle room. Then there is the fact that the EU continues to rely on the US for weaponry and that it needs America's help in supporting Ukraine. Europe likewise lacks a pressure point analogous to China's control of rare earth refining, which allows the Chinese government to threaten retaliation by cutting off an essential input required by US high-tech industries and by the country's defence complex. Finally, like other economies contemplating how to respond, Europe faces a 'madman' problem. Normally, the strongest argument for retaliating is to deter further aggression. A rational leader will understand that launching a trade war, much like launching a conventional war, will provoke a counter-attack in which his country suffers as much as his opponent's. But then, this strategy works only when leaders are rational. Trump's trade-policy decisions are clearly guided by an irrational belief in tariffs—'the most beautiful word in the dictionary," as he puts it—and by the perverse satisfaction he derives from punishing opponents and even allies, regardless of the costs borne by the US itself. Negotiators, not only in Europe, had good reason to fear that Trump would meet retaliation with retaliation, resulting in further damage. Also Read: Mint Explainer: Why does the EU keep sanctioning Russia? There is, however, a contrary view that Europe has shown strength, not weakness. Meeting tariffs with tariffs, especially when these have no deterrent effect, is simply a way of shooting oneself in the economic foot. Higher import prices fuel inflation and thus hurt consumers, while taxing imported inputs, as the US is doing, makes domestic production more costly and less efficient. At the same time, less import competition encourages rent seeking: domestic producers will lobby for tariff concessions and make campaign contributions to obtain them. Thus, Europe has shown its wisdom in shunning self-destructive measures. It now needs to follow up by ratifying its free trade agreement with Latin America's Mercosur bloc, solidifying its trade relations with China and recommitting itself to the multilateral trading system, whether the US participates or not. Something else that Trump's trade war and Thatcher's Falklands War have in common is their utility in distracting attention from their instigators' domestic problems—in Thatcher's case an unemployment crisis and in Trump's the questions about his ties with the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. Helped by her victory in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher would reign for eight more years. The US Constitution prevents Trump from serving as president until 2033. Or so we are led to believe. ©2025/Project Syndicate The author is professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of 'In Defense of Public Debt' Topics You May Be Interested In Catch all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. Download The Mint News App to get Daily Market Updates.
