Prime Minister Narendra Modi launches slew of infrastructure projects from MMRDA Grounds, at Bandra-Kurla Complex, Bandra (East) on Jan. 19, 2023 in Mumbai, India.
Satish Bate | Hindustan Times | Getty Images
Apple has a big week planned in India, where the iPhone maker has growing ambitions.
After opening a flagship store in Mumbai, CEO Tim Cook will travel to New Delhi to meet with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday. Modi is keen to discuss Apple’s plans to continue expanding across the country and about the number of new jobs the company will create, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
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Modi also wants to hear from Cook about the challenges he’s facing in trying to grow the company’s production across the different states, said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the topic.
“Among the biggest impediments now are at the state level,” said Nelson Cunningham, co-founder of diplomatic solutions firm McLarty Associates. “That’s where companies are finding the most headwinds,” added Cunningham, who recently returned from a trip to India.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment about a meeting with Modi.
Apple has been expanding iPhone manufacturing in India through its suppliers. JPMorgan estimates Apple will move 25 percent of its iPhone production to India by 2025.
Apple’s growth in India is widely seen as a success story by Modi and Indian officials. In November, a group of state ministers were deployed to the U.S. to meet with big companies in New York and across Silicon Valley, sources said. Their pitch? You, too, can be like Apple and manufacture and sell in India.
At a recent Council on Foreign Relations meeting that CNBC attended, a high-ranking Indian official said Apple’s achievements represent a good case study for companies considering investing in India.
But Apple’s challenges in India’s consumer market are apparent. India’s smartphone market is dominated by Google’s Android phones, which are typically less expensive than iPhones. Google’s control is so great that the company was slapped with an antitrust fine of $160 million, which was upheld in March by an appeals court in India.
Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, is optimistic on Apple’s prospects.
“Rome was not built overnight and neither will Apple’s broader India strategy,” Ives wrote in a note to clients on Monday.
More broadly for U.S. tech companies, there are concerns about how the Indian government navigates data collection, and a competition policy that’s currently tabled in India’s parliament.
“Where India lands on data protection is an open factor right now,” said Cunningham. “Where they come out will determine whether foreign firms go deeper into India.”
Another issue is a lack of highly specialized labor. While India is on pace to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation, its information technology sector only employs roughly 5 million people.
Some major U.S. corporations have built footholds in India through acquisitions. Walmart bought control of e-retailer Flipkart for $16 billion in 2018. Flipkart and Amazon are dueling for the top spot in India’s e-commerce market, and both face competition from newcomer Meesho.
Disney entered the country following its $71 billion purchase of Fox’s entertainment business. That deal brought with it Star India, which is the nation’s leader in sports media. According to Media Partners Asia, Disney’s Hotstar streaming service had 49 million subscribers in 2022 in India, versus Amazon Prime Video’s 17 million and 7.5 million for Netflix.
“Disney has focused on the mainstream, Bollywood content that appeals to the masses,” said Pramit Chaudhuri, Eurasia Group’s head of South Asia.
FILE PHOTO: Ariel Cohen during a panel at DLD Munich Conference 2020, Europe’s big innovation conference, Alte Kongresshalle, Munich.
Picture Alliance for DLD | Hubert Burda Media | AP
Navan, a developer of corporate travel and expense software, expects its market cap to be as high as $6.5 billion in its IPO, according to an updated regulatory filing on Friday.
The company said it anticipates selling shares at $24 to $26 each. Its valuation in that range would be about $3 billion less than where private investors valued Navan in 2022, when the company announced a $300 million funding round.
CoreWeave, Circle and Figma have led a resurgence in tech IPOs in 2025 after a drought that lasted about three years. Navan filed its original prospectus on Sept. 19, with plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “NAVN.”
Last week, the U.S. government entered a shutdown that has substantially reduced operations inside of agencies including the SEC. In August, the agency said its electronic filing system, EDGAR, “is operated pursuant to a contract and thus will remain fully functional as long as funding for the contractor remains available through permitted means.”
Cerebras, which makes artificial intelligence chips, withdrew its registration for an IPO days after the shutdown began.
Navan CEO Ariel Cohen and technology chief Ilan Twig started the company under the name TripActions in 2015. It’s based in Palo Alto, California, and had around 3,400 employees at the end of July.
For the July quarter, Navan recorded a $38.6 million net loss on $172 million in revenue, which was up about 29% year over year. Competitors include Expensify, Oracle and SAP. Expensify stock closed at $1.64on Friday, down from its $27 IPO price in 2021.
Navan ranked 39th on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list, after also appearing in 2024.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speaking with CNBC’s Jim Cramer during a CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer event at the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 7th, 2025.
Kevin Stankiewicz | CNBC
Shares of Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla each dropped around 5% on Friday, as tech’s megacaps lost $770 billion in market cap, following President Donald Trump’s threats for increased tariffs on Chinese goods.
With tech’s trillion-dollar companies occupying an increasingly large slice of the U.S. market, their declines send the Nasdaq down 3.6% and the S&P 500 down 2.7%. For both indexes, it was the worst day since April, when Trump said he would slap “reciprocal” duties on U.S. trading partners.
After market close on Friday, Trump declared in a social media post that the U.S. would impose a 100% tariff on China and on Nov. 1 it would apply export controls “on any and all critical software.”
Amazon, Nvidia and Tesla all slipped about 2% in extended trading following the post.
The president’s latest threats are disrupting, at least briefly, what had been a sustained rally in tech, built on hundreds of billions of dollars in planned spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.
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In late September, Nvidia, which makes graphics processing units for training AI models, became the first company to reach a market cap of $4.5 trillion. Nvidia alone saw its market capitalization decline by nearly $229 billion on Friday.
OpenAI counts on Nvidia’s GPUs from a series of cloud suppliers, including Microsoft. OpenAI is only seeing rising demand.
In September it introduced the Sora 2 video creation app, and this week the company said the ChatGPT assistant now boasts over 800 million weekly users. But Microsoft must buy infrastructure to operate its cloud data centers. Microsoft’s market cap dropped by $85 billion on Friday.
The sell-off wiped out Amazon’s gains for the year. That stock is now down 2% so far in 2025. It competes with Microsoft to rent out GPUs from its cloud data centers, but it doesn’t have major business with OpenAI. The online retailer is now worth $121 billion less than it was on Thursday.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts in July. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Tesla, which introduced lower-priced vehicles on Tuesday, saw its market capitalization sink by $71 billion.
The automaker reports third-quarter results on Oct. 22, with Microsoft earnings scheduled for the following week. Nvidia reports in November.
Google parent Alphabet and Facebook owner Meta fell 2% and almost 4%, respectively.
Govini, a defense tech software startup taking on the likes of Palantir, has blown past $100 million in annual recurring revenue, the company announced Friday.
“We’re growing faster than 100% in a three-year CAGR, and I expect that next year we’ll continue to do the same,” CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty told CNBC’s Morgan Brennan in an interview. With how “big this market is, we can keep growing for a long, long time, and that’s really exciting.”
CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate, a measurement of the rate of return.
The Arlington, Virginia-based company also announced a $150 million growth investment from Bain Capital. It plans to use the money to expand its team and product offering to satisfy growing security demands.
In recent years, venture capitalists have poured more money into defense tech startups like Govini to satisfy heightened national security concerns and modernize the military as global conflict ensues.
The group, which includes unicorns like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, Shield AI and artificial intelligence beneficiary Palantir, is taking on legacy giants such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, that have long leaned on contracts from the Pentagon.
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Dougherty, who previously worked at Palantir, said she hopes the company can seize a “vertical slice” of the defense technology space.
The 14-year-old Govini has already secured a string of big wins in recent years, including an over $900-million U.S. government contract and deals with the Department of War.
Govini is known for its flagship AI software Ark, which it says can help modernize the military’s defense tech supply chain by better managing product lifecycles as military needs grow more sophisticated.
“If the United States can get this acquisition system right, it can actually be a decisive advantage for us,” Dougherty said.
Looking ahead, Dougherty told CNBC that she anticipates some setbacks from the government shutdown.
Navy customers could be particularly hard hit, and that could put the U.S. at a major disadvantage.
While the U.S. is maintaining its AI dominance, China is outpacing its shipbuilding capacity and that needs to be taken “very seriously,” she added.