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Voice trading makes a comeback in $30tn Treasury market

The rise of leveraged hedge fund strategies means more trades conducted by phone or messaging

The share of electronic trading in the nearly $30tn Treasury market has fallen to its lowest level in eight years, as exotic Wall Street bets on US debt push investors to make more trades manually.

Almost half of all trading in Treasuries this year has been done by one-to-one messaging or over the telephone in transactions too large and complex to be conducted without human involvement — the biggest share since 2017, according to industry research group Crisil Coalition Greenwich.

The comeback of so-called voice trading — which had been falling as a share of overall Treasury trading for decades — reflects the growing importance of what are known as package trades, often conducted by hedge funds.

“The volume growth [in voice trading] is coming in large part from these large package trades that are executed manually,” said Kevin McPartland, Coalition Greenwich’s head of market structure and technology research.

Academics and analysts say hedge funds are among the primary users of package trades, which include strategies such as the basis trade and interest rate swaps that demand direct contact between the two sides of a transaction.

“The increased volume of package trades is very likely ascribable to hedge funds that are arbitraging the cash-futures basis and now sizeable swap spreads,” said Darrell Duffie, a professor at Stanford University who is an expert in Treasury market structure.

“As to why this has generated relatively more voice trades than electronic trades . . . I would guess this is [because] the three legs of basis trades are executed separately,” he said.

Coalition’s data shows that for this year to the end of October, 54 per cent of the notional value of Treasury trading was placed electronically, down from a peak of 67 per cent in the full year of 2019.

Instead, a growing share of Treasury trading has involved complex, multi-step wagers such as the highly leveraged hedge fund strategies that many analysts say exacerbated the turmoil that hit the Treasury market after US President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff blitz in April.

Manual trading had been in decline for decades, as advances in technology enable more and more transactions to be done by machines interacting with other machines.

But the growth of electronic trading is happening at a slower pace than the growth of the overall market. Voice trading, meanwhile, has started to grow more quickly.

It is commonly used in the basis trade, for example, in which hedge funds exploit differences in price between a cash Treasury bond and its equivalent futures contract. While such differences tend to be small, hedge funds borrow heavily in short-term lending markets to fund their bets, turning small differences into large profits.

The complexity and the pricing of these transactions mean that they are typically done over the phone or through messaging chats.

Since 2020, Coalition Greenwich has calculated the breakdown of trading by measuring the volume at big electronic trading venues such as Tradeweb and Bloomberg, as well as trading conducted directly between banks and clients against the total value of Treasuries traded.

The use of electronic trading on Wall Street has been gaining ground for decades, initially with the buying and selling of equities. This shift has given rise to so-called non-bank liquidity providers such as Citadel Securities and Jane Street. These firms have captured market share at the expense of large investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, which had traditionally dominated Wall Street market making.

“We’re seeing growing demand for new ways to access electronic liquidity, with trade sizes increasing,” said Michael de Pass, global head of rates trading at Citadel Securities.

“That being said, our clients continue to want to execute larger trades with us via voice and that requires a strong human element of trust and comfort. This is a dynamic that we believe will continue to exist in the market.”

Fixed income markets, including the giant Treasury market, have been slower to embrace electronic trading because of their more opaque pricing systems and complex structures. While a company will typically have just one traded stock, for example, it may have multiple tradeable bonds of various maturities.

Nevertheless, the parameters of what can be done electronically have expanded. Two decades ago, a rough rule of thumb was that Treasury trades of more than $50mn needed to be done over the phone. This has since swelled to about $250mn.

Platforms such as Tradeweb say the trend towards electronification is still well under way in the Treasury market.

Bhas Nalabothula, head of US institutional rates at Tradeweb, said the volume of Treasury trading conducted on the platform had grown fivefold since 2017, while turnover on the total Treasury market had doubled over the same period.

“The trend towards more electronic trading in Treasures is unmistakable — it is a one-way train and there is no going back,” he said.

Decrease in take-up of early retirement and voluntary redundancy programmes since June

Volkswagen has suffered a dramatic slowdown in the number of workers agreeing to quit their jobs at its German sites as the carmaker attempts a sweeping cost-cutting plan.

The ailing group is trying to reduce employee numbers at VW brand sites in the country by 35,000 by 2030 compared with levels at the start of 2024.

But it remains 10,000 short of that goal as the number of staff accepting redundancy or early retirement plummeted in the three months to September, according to an internal memo seen by the Financial Times.

Of the 25,000 staff who have reached exit agreements since the start of 2024, just 1,000 did so in the third quarter of this year, according to a note shared with workers which was seen by the Financial Times and confirmed by a person close to the company.

Voluntary exits in the 18 months to June 2025 averaged 4,000 every three months but the memo did not give a breakdown of the number of planned departures per quarter during that period.

The 35,000 target was set as part of a cost-cutting programme agreed with unions last December and represents roughly a quarter of the brand’s headcount as of the start of 2024.

Trimming headcount further will be “increasingly difficult”, according to Stefan Bratzel, director of the Center of Automotive Management, an independent German research institute.

But he said VW’s savings programme was on a “good path”, with the group needing to be “much leaner and more efficient” to survive the sector’s upheaval.

Volkswagen declined to comment on the exact rate of progress in the job reductions. A person familiar with its thinking said the pace at which it could plan new departures had slowed over the summer, when many employees were away on holiday.

The number of volunteers to leave the company could increase once an early retirement scheme was opened to younger employees, the person added.

A job guarantee until 2030 meant “no one is being forced to be part of the reduced headcount”, said a spokesperson for VW’s works council. While VW has until 2030 to meet its target, the structure of its early retirement schemes means some workers sign up years in advance of their exit date.

Thomas Schäfer, chief executive of the VW brand, acknowledged last week that “we still have a way to go” on the job cuts, adding that the carmaker was “consistently implementing” the programme.

The brand’s head of human resources Arne Meiswinkel said last week that VW was making “good progress” with the plan to reduce its headcount.

The slower pace of exit agreements comes as VW wrestles with higher US tariffs and large losses at its luxury sports car marque Porsche.

The cost pressures have left the group with little room to make additional investments.

The group’s chief financial officer Arno Antlitz warned last month that VW needed to “intensify our cost reduction efforts”, with the company facing an estimated €5bn hit from US tariffs in 2025.

Of the 25,000 exit deals struck so far, about 11,000 employees have already left, while another 14,000 have agreed to leave over the coming years. The brand had 115,000 staff in Germany at the end of 2023, according to VW’s most recent quarterly results.

Almost three-quarters of the departures agreed so far have been via an early retirement programme while others have been through voluntary redundancy.

So far, the voluntary redundancy programme has generally only been open to white-collar workers, but now factory-floor workers, who are relatively well paid for the industry and have fewer outside job options, will also be included.

Schäfer said factory costs at three of the carmaker’s largest sites — Wolfsburg, Emden and Zwickau — had been cut by 30 per cent on average as part of the savings programme.

Robert De Niro: ‘the sky’s the limit’ for Nobu residences

The restaurant-turned-hospitality brand co-founded by the actor is riding the branded residences boom — and the pipeline stretches from Manchester to Mexico

It’s a cold, lead-sky day in Manchester, and actor Robert De Niro, chef Nobu Matsuhisa and film producer Meir Teper are having lunch in a makeshift marquee on a building site in the city centre’s Deansgate area. The portable heating units are on full blast; trams rattle overhead. 

The founders of global hospitality brand Nobu aren’t savouring plates of black cod with miso, yellowtail jalapeño or any of the other Japanese-Peruvian dishes on the celebrated restaurant’s menu. They are tucking into bowls of chips, gravy and “Manchester caviar” — mushy peas. 

Nearly 40 years after De Niro first ate at Matsuhisa’s restaurant in Los Angeles and spotted the potential for a joint venture in New York’s Tribeca neighbourhood, the trio are in the city to break ground on the construction of a new branded residence. The Nobu Hospitality Group, founded 31 years ago, and which now counts 50 or so restaurants, 40 hotels and two residences across five continents in its stable, was recently valued at $1.3bn, after Crown Resorts sold its 20 per cent stake in July 2024. Now, it is seeing its biggest phase of expansion.

Having segued into hotels in 2013, starting with Las Vegas, and opening the first branded residential scheme in Los Cabos, Mexico, in 2023, Nobu is creating a pipeline of 18 more residential projects, including Tulum, São Paulo, Barbuda — and now Manchester, where work is just beginning on 452 apartments and a hotel in a 76-storey tower set around the site’s Grade II-listed Victorian viaduct arches. 

“I’m there for aesthetic and strategic decisions, where we go next,” says a softly spoken De Niro as he politely requests a pot of tea to warm up. He nevertheless wears that quizzical expression, familiar to all, from his almost 60-year film career.

He is also, he says, tired. Not surprisingly, given this is the final leg of a whistle-stop European tour during which the co-founders have announced or opened projects in five cities in six days — including Amsterdam, for the groundbreaking of the city’s first standalone branded residences project, and Rome, where De Niro was awarded the city’s highest honour, the Lupa Capitolina, and the trio met Pope Leo XIV. In a few hours, he’s on a plane again, back home to New York. 

“Sometimes I’ve felt a location doesn’t resonate with the brand. I don’t want to say which, but me being a layperson, my perception is as someone who’s looking at it fresh — and if it doesn’t make sense to me, I say we shouldn’t waste our energy on that,” De Niro continues. He admits he’s not that familiar with Manchester. “Yet. But I will come back.” Matsuhisa adds modestly, with a broad smile, of his own role: “I don’t know much about money. I know about quality of fish.” 

Manchester — a £360mn scheme by local developers Salboy Capital, whose 40-storey Viadux residential tower stands next to the Nobu site, part of the city’s new skyscraper district — “is one of the most dynamic cities in the UK, culturally, economically and architecturally. Great global brands need to be in the great modern cities of the UK, not just London,” says Trevor Horwell, chief executive of Nobu Hospitality Group since 2009. “For us, it’s about partner and location. It’s about the relationship.”

Nobu is riding the branded residences boom. The number of schemes has risen from 169 in 2011 to 611 this year, according to a recent report by Knight Frank. By 2030 the number is estimated to be around 1,020 — an increase of 67 per cent. “I’m not saying we jumped on the bandwagon, but we started to look at the trend and we wanted to do it selectively with the right partners,” says Horwell. The 20 global residential projects open or in development represent $3bn of investment from their partners. 

Nobu partners with local and international developers and long-term investors, some in just one or two locations, others, such as LionTree Investment, in the entire group. “They own the bricks and mortar. Nobu brings the brand,” says Horwell. The restaurant always comes first. “It’s an upside-down business model where the restaurant is the social engine. If we believe a Nobu restaurant can become a genuine social hub for locals, then the hotel and residences can follow.”

They are not the only restaurant brand in the sector. Take Cipriani; there are five Cipriani or Mr C Residences schemes in the US and UAE, and more to follow in Europe and Asia. Nobu is “a “great example of how an F & B [food and beverage] brand can expand into the residences sphere successfully,” says Chris Graham, founder of branded residences consultancy Graham Associates. “Ten years ago, I’d have said there was no chance a restaurant brand could do that.”

“It’s a cool, chef-led brand with a bit of stardust — and its stars turn up. They give a good show,” Graham adds. “But it’s [successful] not just because it’s Nobu . . . it’s because they choose the right location, the right pricing and because of the design.” Nobu Residences Toronto opened earlier this year; two towers of 658 units sold out within three months, says Horwell. Prices for a one-bedroom apartment began at C$300,000; ($212,900) some achieved the highest prices for a branded residential scheme in the city.

Back in Manchester, some industry experts question whether 452 high-end units — rather than a mix of trophy and small investor-driven units — will be too much stock for the city to swallow. But Louis Keighley, head of Savills’ global residential development consultancy, says that “there’s a lot of wealth in Manchester — and Nobu’s timing is spot on. Being the first to do something in a location is a big risk, but W Manchester were first. Being second is a great position to be in. Salboy’s reputation is strong and Nobu has delivered two good projects [elsewhere], so that will help diversify the buyer pool. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see three to five more branded schemes launching in Manchester soon.” 

Nobu’s property buyers, says Horwell, often start as diners, then become hotel guests, then residents. “They’re not just buying square footage. They’re buying a cultural connection . . . We’re already seeing cross-project interest with owners buying in more than one country.” 

Hospitality gives the Nobu Group an edge, believes Teper: “It makes more sense to me to buy [into] a brand known for its food and hospitality than to buy a residence by [a fashion brand],” he says. “What are they going to give me — some dresses in the closet?” De Niro nods: “The food is so important. The other companies don’t have that” — prompting Matsuhisa to add his main concern: “Who’s going to do the cooking?” 

“The risk is reputational,” says Graham. “The brand must do their due diligence with who they partner with. The experience of residents and hotel guests will determine its success.” 

Nobu is now making a beeline for the Middle East. It has already made its mark in the region; the Nobu Residences in Abu Dhabi on Saadiyat Island, opening in 2027, set a new local record, with an off-plan penthouse that sold for $37.3mn, more than Dh96,000 ($26,140) per sq metre.  

Cairo and Ras Al-Khaimah in the UAE also have schemes in the works. As does Al Khobar, one of the few designated areas for foreign property buyers in Saudi Arabia, as determined by a new law that takes effect in January. Vision 2030, Crown Prince Bin Salman’s initiative to drive economic diversification beyond its dependence on oil, and more than $3tr of investment, “has opened up a new market for high-end brands and we felt the timing was right”, says Horwell. “The Middle East is evolving at an extraordinary pace. We see positive momentum in creativity, tourism and urban development, and we aim to contribute constructively to that evolution.” 

Saudi Arabia’s record for human rights abuses means some brands are reticent to open there. But the list of other global brands that have, or which have announced residential projects in the past few years, is growing, and includes the Four Seasons, Elie Saab and Ritz-Carlton. 

Rather than simply “flag-planting” in limitless new locations, Horwell says place-making and regeneration are key to Nobu’s ethos. In Al Khobar, the brand is helping to create a new waterfront neighbourhood. “Nobu isn’t just a tenant. We’re a partner in shaping the district.” 

The pace of expansion seems relentless, but “You can’t compare Nobu to the big hotel brands that still dominate, such as Ritz-Carlton, which has 60 completed schemes and 40 in the next five years,” says Keighley. “But as a non-hotel brand — which Nobu began as — then they are leading the space, along with Missoni, Fendi and Lamborghini.” 

De Niro says he never could have imagined the business would take off in the way it has. “I figured it would just be in Tribeca. But I started thinking that if we were asked to go into places to help kick them off, to give them a certain cachet and credibility, I thought at the very least we should be approaching these partners and say we want to do a restaurant and a hotel. That’s how it started.”

“The sky’s the limit,” De Niro says of the pipeline. Horwell muses on a future in which the group becomes “the LVMH of hospitality, harnessing other brands under the Nobu umbrella”. 

So why not residences in London? “My answer may be wrong, but nobody asked us,” De Niro laughs — and I’m not sure if he’s joking. London was the location of the brand’s first European restaurant; Nobu Old Park Lane opened in 1997. The hotel Nobu Portman Square followed in 2020. “It deserves a flagship Nobu residential project,” says Horwell. “I like Marylebone.”

Still, at this Manchester lunch, the clear camaraderie when the group are on the road together is clear. They talk of dining in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, bathed in the glow of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch”, and of their papal visit. Says Teper: “You can’t get more of a highlight than that. Once in a lifetime.” 

They clearly have an appetite, too, for trying new local delicacies — though it could be some time before Manchester caviar makes it on to a Nobu menu. 

Booming production may buoy the domestic economy, but is causing environmental damage and trade tensions

In late August, several thousand farmers gathered at the village of Kohadiya, in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. Word had spread that an iron ore and steel plant was coming to the area.

People from about two dozen local communities converged on a public meeting to protest against the proposed construction of the 60-acre facility next to their land, where crops including tomatoes, rice, jackfruit and guava are grown.

The site’s owners, local conglomerate Hira Group, set out in environmental assessment documents how it would mitigate the polluting impact from the coal-fired plant where sponge iron would be melted into liquid steel.

But the technical specifics were besides the point to the local residents, whose familiarity with the ash, contamination and pollution from Chhattisgarh’s legion of small-scale iron factories led them to combine forces.

“If we were alone, they might have been able to pressurise us into submission,” says Daneshwar Verma, a 31-year-old landowner, sitting in Kohadiya’s dusty village hall, alongside about 10 community leaders beneath portraits of Mahatma Gandhi and India’s first post-independence prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. “United, they cannot ignore us.”

The protest at Kohadiya encapsulates the broader dilemma India faces as its largely coal-fed and highly polluting steel industry expands to support the country’s ascendant economy and its vast demand for new highways, bridges, factories, ports and housing.

India has doubled steel production in the past decade, overtaking Japan to become the world’s second-largest steelmaker. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is now aiming to boost India’s steelmaking capacity to 300mn tonnes by 2030, almost double its level in 2024.

In a global industry grappling with slowing demand in major markets such as China, where consumption has plateaued, India’s steel use bucks the trend, forecast to rise about 6 per cent a year through 2035.

“India is the best story as far as the steel industry is concerned, globally, there’s no other major market growing at this pace — in fact, most markets are shrinking,” says TV Narendran, chief executive at Tata Steel, one of the country’s biggest producers of the metal. “India is underinvested in infrastructure.”

The scale of that growth, however, comes with significant costs. Despite its essential role in engineering and construction, steel is one of the world’s dirtiest materials. Its production accounts for around 8 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

In India, steel production is responsible for around 12 per cent of total emissions, the highest share of any industrial sector. Much of that output flows from a ballooning proliferation of small and poorly regulated factories, which rely on coal and blast furnace technology whose basic mechanisms have remained little changed since the 1800s.

Almost half of India’s steel comes from such producers and “unfortunately their process is not the best”, Sajjan Jindal, the billionaire chair of the JSW Group conglomerate and India’s largest steelmaker, tells the Financial Times. “They generate much, much more CO₂, so that’s a challenge . . . eventually this has to be modernised.”

An estimated 2.5mn Indians work directly and indirectly across the sector, making reforms challenging in the world’s most populous country as it attempts to provide widespread employment for its enormous labour force. “These small and medium-scale steel industries are spread across India and so many people are employed,” adds Jindal. “It’s very tough politically also to scrap that.”

Industry leaders and analysts question whether India, the third-largest carbon emitter, can reconcile its hunger for cheap steel with the climate imperative to clean it up. There are few viable business models to scale up cleaner steel production in the country, notes Sumant Sinha, chief executive of ReNew, one of India’s largest renewable power developers. “I can’t imagine that anybody would want to do it voluntarily,” he says.

Yet international pressure is mounting. Over one-third of India’s 6.4mn metric tonnes of annual steel exports go to Europe, which will implement its divisive carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) on January 1, a tax on polluting overseas producers aimed at protecting EU industry from being undercut by cheaper but dirtier imports.

India’s European exports are expected to be disproportionately affected by the new rules, with Chinese steel imports subjected to an average tariff of 7.75 per cent compared with India’s 16 per cent levy, according to the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins University.

With almost 90 per cent of India’s operating iron-making capacity dependent on coal, making the country one of the most emissions-intensive steel producers, research group Global Energy Monitor warns that India could eventually be left with $187bn of stranded assets.

“India’s strategy has mostly been to develop steel capacity right now to feed its growing demand . . . and worrying about decarbonising later,” says Henna Khadeeja, heavy industry researcher at Global Energy Monitor. “We are creating a big carbon monster that we will not be able to tackle in the future.”

JSW’s gargantuan steel facility at Vijayanagar in southern India is a visual testament to the rapid rise of the metal production underpinning the domestic economy, the fastest growing of any major country.

What was once a “godforsaken” barren expanse of land, according to PK Murugan, president of JSW’s Vijayanagar site, has become a meticulously planned industrial city since its commissioning in the 1990s.

A private airport jets in visiting executives and dignitaries, while tree-lined residential blocks house workers beside the 10,000-acre steelworks, the largest in India, producing 17.5mn tonnes of the metal a year.

Behind its monumental edifice, sparks fly from open blast furnaces that burn a hellish red beside large slag heaps. Overhead, miles-long conveyor belts shuttle iron ore from nearby mines across the metal labyrinth as gas flares shoot up from towers across the vast site.

Like most of the country’s major steelmakers, JSW is grappling with the complex imperative of decarbonising the sector.

A government report last year set out the core challenges. While richer countries benefit from abundant recyclable scrap steel, cleaner electricity grids and access to affordable cleaner natural gas, India is constrained by limited scrap availability and expensive gas. Instead, integrated steel plants tend to be powered by coal, further increasing emissions.

There is little price incentive to change course, says one industry executive. “If I can get gas at $4 and my [coal] price is $0.5, why will I move towards gas?” they say. “We are businessmen.”

India’s raw materials add to the problem. “The iron ore quality is not great,” says Hemant Mallya, who leads industrial sustainability at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based think-tank. “What that means is to remove the [impurities], you need to use higher amounts of energy.”

While India is “less efficient” compared with other major steel-producing nations, with an emissions intensity of 2.5 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of crude steel compared with the global average of 1.9 tonnes, “we are also seeing private players initiating pilot projects and investing in decarbonising”, says Shreyas Shende, senior research associate at the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab.

Inside the control room of JSW’s Blast Furnace 4 in Vijayanagar, sheltered from the fierce heat and noxious gases produced by the open blazing flame in the pit outside, engineers outline steps they are taking to reduce the steel company’s emissions from 2.37 tonnes to 1.95 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne of crude steel by 2030.

Those include expanding the use of renewable energy at its plants, waste heat recovery and carbon capture pilots. JSW Steel now operates 1-gigawatt of renewable power capacity at its factories and is trialing a 25-megawatt green hydrogen plant at Vijayanagar.

“There are so many new technologies,” says Jindal, pointing to the “many, many micro steps” being taken to reduce coal usage. However, the tycoon concedes that green hydrogen, a potential cleaner fuel for steel production, remains uneconomical and intermittence in solar and wind power means there “is a lot of to and fro happening on this”.

With the EU’s CBAM looming, New Delhi is also trying to demonstrate seriousness in cleaning up the sector as part of its 2070 net zero plans.

The steel ministry is working on financial incentives and may require minimum green steel use in state-funded projects. But last year it defined green steel as output emitting less than 2.2 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne, which is above the global average for steel production.

Still, Indian officials, including the country’s finance minister, have lashed out against the EU’s plans calling CBAM an arbitrary “trade barrier” as the country attempts to industrialise and argues that it has not been historically responsible for the world’s build-up of greenhouse gas.

The EU’s policy “will definitely impact” steel exports, India’s steel secretary Sandeep Poundrik told an audience in September at the FT’s Energy Transition Summit India in New Delhi. “CBAM is an area of concern.”

India’s lobbying so far has had limited success. EU officials told the FT this month that an Indian exemption proposal, under which the country would levy its own export fees based on value not carbon content, would not incentivise manufacturers to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Indian steel executives, including Jindal, downplay the immediate impact of CBAM. Only around 5 per cent of India’s steel is exported to Europe, according to the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab.

Even so, JSW is commissioning a green-steel plant near Mumbai designed to supply cleaner products to the EU. “We keep [CBAM] in mind,” says Murugan at the Vijayanagar plant. “We have got various strategies to comply with that, because we want to be in the global market.”

But analysts are dismissive that there will be a quick technological solution. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis reported this month that 94 per cent of India’s planned green hydrogen capacity remains at the announcement stage, with higher production costs at around $4-5 a kilogramme a principal deterrent.

“Until and unless it reduces to something around $1 per kg, it will not be feasible,” says Nivit Kumar Yadav of the Centre for Science and Environment in New Delhi. New blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnace plants continue to be built in India, he notes, meaning they will operate for decades to come.

On the outskirts of Ludhiana in the northern state of Punjab, Tata Steel’s first green steel plant provides a glimpse of an alternative path. The 117-acre facility will run on natural gas when it opens in March, but will produce only 850,000 tonnes of steel a year — albeit with comparatively low emissions of 0.4 tonnes of CO₂ per tonne.

Driving through the surrounding farmland, David William Augustine, the plant’s chief, says local villages enjoy clean air. “We have to keep it that way.”

Yet the economics remain forbidding for a wider rollout. “Customers are not yet willing to pay you a premium for green steel, like they do in Europe,” says Tata Steel CEO Narendran. The plant cost an estimated $340mn to build.

India’s “government needs to have more policies in place to support this transition”, he adds, listing support such as the UK’s funding of £500mn for Tata’s upgrade to a cleaner electric arc steel furnace at its Port Talbot plant in Wales.

“There’s no business case for the transition,” says Narendran. “No steel plant can afford to invest.”

In the lands around Kohadiya, coal pits, iron ore mines and steel mills have carved an industrial frontier through one of India’s most mineral-rich yet environmentally scarred regions.

On the road to the village, the outskirts of Raipur, the state capital of Chhattisgarh, give way to a brutal landscape of rusting factory complexes and towering smoke-belching chimneys. Fine black dust settles on nearby vegetation and buildings, while small streams run with blue and grey effluent. The air carries a pungent burning smell.

The villagers in and near Kohadiya are little concerned about India’s global competitiveness. Rather they are anxious that the planned steel and iron ore processing plant will damage crops and contaminate the air. Many refer to Siltara, a nearby industrial hub, as a cautionary tale.

“A white lamb looks black around there . . . we know what is lost,” says Rohit Shivare, the 51-year-old village chief, who has worked as a welder at a steel facility in Siltara. “We do not want a steel plant here because we already live in pollution for eight hours a day. We will at least have clean air at night when we are back home.”

Their concerns echo those across India’s industrial heartlands. In Koppal, a town in southern India close to the Unesco-recognised Hampi temple monuments, residents recently burnt effigies of a government minister after he unveiled plans for a $280mn steel plant they fear will poison their fields and further degrade air quality.

Sponge iron plants are a particular flashpoint. They are “not only greenhouse gas polluting, but they produce lots of hazardous waste material,” says Yadav at the CSE think-tank. “Wherever they are, they are causing a lot of pollution to the nearby community.”

Seated in a side office in his plush home in an expansive compound in Raipur, Abhishek Agrawal, executive director at Hira Group, which is developing the factory close to Kohadiya, defends the region’s industrial expansion. He says the company is experimenting with pilot green technologies, including carbon capture, though these remain far from commercially attractive.

“Change is the only constitution, slowly and slowly, probably two years, three years down the line it starts making economic sense,” he says.

Agrawal acknowledges the broader environmental impacts of the Kohadiya plant. “We do understand it’s polluting,” he says, but argues that economic development must continue. “If industry doesn’t come they will not grow, they won’t get more income.”

But Verma, the landowning farmer, sees the question of growth from a different perspective. “A steel plant here will not have any benefit for us, it’s only a loss,” he says. “The pollution will not let anything grow.”

Blackstone and KKR among the groups preparing to take control of Colisée and inject more than €250mn

Private equity firm EQT is set to hand creditors the keys to its French nursing home group Colisée, as lenders including Blackstone and KKR prepare to take control of the heavily indebted business.

The restructuring of Colisée’s €1.8bn in debt will involve creditors injecting more than €250mn into the company, according to people familiar with discussions, wiping out a third of the debt and taking 100 per cent of the company’s equity. Colisée’s €1.2bn secured loan is trading at just 55 cents on the euro, a sign it is viewed as a high credit risk.

It is the latest in a string of restructurings in France in recent months, as economic shocks push struggling French companies into negotiations with the holders of their debt, often US hedge funds.

Other companies currently in talks with creditors include retailer Casino, which is on course for its second debt restructuring in less than two years with a proposed €300mn injection from majority shareholder Daniel Křetínský.

EQT had its own offer to recapitalise Colisée with €250mn of equity rejected by creditors earlier this year. One adviser to Colisée’s creditors said that lender-led restructurings were becoming “more and more frequent in France” and “not just for small companies”.

Higher interest rates combined with weaker than expected financial performance and the removal of post-Covid support for businesses have led to many indebted companies running into difficulty in recent months.

In France, the pressure is particularly acute as there has been a higher number of leveraged buyouts in recent years than elsewhere in Europe, and several businesses are vulnerable to downturns in consumer spending, in sectors such as retail and telecoms.

Other high-profile restructurings in recent years include care home provider Orpea and telecoms company Altice.

Colisée is one of two troubled French investments for EQT.

Cerba, a laboratory company bought by EQT in 2021, had struggled to maintain the high levels of profitability it enjoyed during the Covid-19 boom in medical testing, people following the situation said.

Cerba’s secured bonds are trading at 73 cents on the euro, while its unsecured debt is trading at about 13 cents on the euro, as lenders expecting heavy losses have sold out.

A French government-led audit of the laboratory sector warned in August that more restructurings in the sector were “inevitable given the risks taken by investors and lenders in recent acquisitions based on the assumption that laboratories would continue to generate abnormally high profitability”.

Colisée, EQT and Blackstone declined to comment. KKR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

With holiday shopping on the horizon, OpenAI and Perplexity both announced AI shopping features this week, which integrate into their existing chatbots to help users research potential purchases.

The tools are markedly similar to one another. OpenAI suggests that users could ask ChatGPT for help finding a “new laptop suitable for gaming under $1000 with a screen that’s over 15 inches,” or they can share photos of a high-end garment and ask for something similar at a lower price point.

Perplexity, meanwhile, is playing up how its chatbot’s memory can augment shopping-related searches for its users, suggesting that someone could ask for recommendations tailored to what the chatbot already knows about them, like where they live or what they do for work.

Adobe predicted that AI-assisted online shopping will grow by 520% this holiday season, which could be a boon for AI shopping startups like Phia, Cherry, or Deft — but with OpenAI and Perplexity pushing further into AI shopping experiences, are these startups in danger?

Zach Hudson, CEO of the interior design shopping tool Onton, thinks that AI shopping startups with a specialized niche will still provide a better experience to users than general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

“Any model or knowledge graph is only as good as its data sources,” Hudson told TechCrunch. “Right now, ChatGPT and LLM-based tools like Perplexity piggyback off existing search indexes like Bing or Google. That makes them really only as good as the first few results that come back from those indexes.”

Daydream CEO and longtime e-commerce executive Julie Bornstein agrees — she remarked to TechCrunch over the summer that she always viewed search as “the forgotten child” of the fashion industry, since it never worked particularly well.

“Fashion … is uniquely nuanced and emotional — finding a dress you love is not the same as finding a television,” Bornstein told TechCrunch on Tuesday. “That level of understanding for fashion shopping comes from domain-specific data and merchandising logic that grasps silhouettes, fabrics, occasions, and how people build outfits over time.”

AI shopping startups develop their own datasets so that their tools are trained on higher-quality data — something that’s easier to achieve when you’re attempting to catalog fashion or furniture, rather than the sum of all human knowledge.

In Hudson’s case, Onton developed a data pipeline to catalog hundreds of thousands of interior design products in a cleaner manner, helping to train its internal models with better data. But if AI shopping startups don’t pursue that level of specialization, Hudson thinks they’re bound to be overshadowed.

“If you’re using only off-the-shelf LLMs and a conversational interface, it’s very hard to see how a startup can compete with the larger companies,” Hudson said.

The advantage for OpenAI and Perplexity, however, is that their customers are already using their tools — plus, their large presence lets them ink deals with major retailers from the get-go. While Daydream and Phia redirect customers to retailers’ websites to complete their purchases — sometimes earning affiliate revenue — OpenAI and Perplexity have partnerships with Shopify and PayPal, respectively, allowing users to check out within the conversational interface.

These companies, which depend on mammoth amounts of expensive compute power to operate, are still trying to figure out a path to profitability. If they take inspiration from Google and Amazon, then it makes sense to look toward e-commerce as an option — retailers could pay them to advertise their products within search results.

But eventually, that could just exacerbate the existing issues that customers have with search.

“Vertical models — whether in fashion, travel, or home goods — will outperform because they’re tuned to real consumer decision-making,” Bornstein said.