Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Gideon Long and in this edition, within the next hour or so, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is expected to meet Donald Trump at the White House and sign a deal to give the US access to his country's minerals.
The deal looks not bad and quite good for Ukraine, not only for the economic interest in general, but also for the future.
Plus, has China's technology minister become the latest victim of Xi Jinping's anti -corruption drive.
The internet calling service Skype is to become a thing of the past.
And what would you do if you missed a business meeting because you're in the cinema and the start of your film is delayed by endless adverts?
We speak to a man who took the cinema to court and won.
Well, we start the programme in Delhi because the European Union is there today and says it hopes to conclude a free trade agreement with India by the end of this year, which would be a big deal as it's now 18 years since those negotiations first started.
In a moment, you'll hear from the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but first here's the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, who led the EU delegation to New Delhi.
Over the past two decades, our trade has tripled.
All this is prove that our businesses and people want to work together.
Now we have tasked our teams to build on this momentum and finalize our free trade agreement before the end of the year.
We're expecting a lot of our trade negotiations.
We told them they should surprise us.
Many decisions have been taken to elevate and accelerate our partnership.
Trade, technology, investment, innovation, green growth, security, skilling and on mobility and we have prepared a blueprint for collaboration in these areas.
Malachana Shukla is the BBC's India Business Correspondent in the financial hub of Mumbai and she told me there were two reasons why it's taken so long to get to this point.
One, the earlier political dispensation in India wasn't pushing it as much further as Prime Minister Modi's government has been in the last few years where PM Modi has focused on building trade deals with certain key markets as one of his main focus points.
But the second and the biggest reason is that the two parties, the EU and India, while they are very crucial trade partners, they've had major differences from tariffs to carbon tax.
EU has openly raised objections to India's high tariffs.
And in fact, earlier this week, one of the officials had called India a relatively closed market.
They say that some of the key products like cars and wines and agricultural products that are very commercially relevant to EU invites a very high tariffs when imported into India.
India, on its part, has been very miffed on the additional carbon tax that EU has levied where they charge additional 30 percent on imports based on the carbon footprint.
And that, India says, hurts their metal exports to EU, which is a big market for metal exports from India.
These have been some of the key areas.
And also, mobility of skilled labor from India into the European market has been something that has been like a stumbling block on talks.
But these seem to be easing now, considering the geopolitics has changed, the global relations have changed, and both parties seem more eager and willing to discuss this in a positive way further.
I've been speaking to Dr.
Arpita Mukherjee, a professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in Delhi.
And I asked her what a deal would mean for India.
Oh, it's a massive benefit for us.
With the European Union, we have a positive trade balance in a number of items, in agri items.
We have many of our industry for a long time.
If you look at the apparel industry for the last 20 years have been saying that we want a zero for zero so the industry many of our industries very pro these FTAs then then the services EU is a big market EU already signaled that it would go for further opening up of you know labor mobility and workforce
mobility so I think the signals are in the right directions investment we would like to attract investment from the EU.
India also announced and in the recent budget, there was an announcement that India needs to relook into its investment agreements and make it more friendly, which means that probably we will be able to sign a deal with the EU.
One of the areas is access to dairy in the EU market.
That's a kind of area where there is a bit of a sensitivity involved or reducing the dairy tariff.
But if both sides declare that some of these very sensitive things can be ignored for the time being, FTA should not be a problem by the end of the year.
Well, all this comes on a day when India is given as another glimpse into the dynamism of its economy.
It's released its GDP, gross domestic product data, for the final quarter of last year and growth was 6 .2 % year on year.
Here's Archana again.
The numbers do look rosy when you look at it from a Western and the other major economies perspective.
6 .2 % in the October to December quarter was largely helped by a sharp jump in government spending on building infrastructure.
The second reason has been a pickup in rural India spending.
You know, we had a good harvest this time and that has boosted rural incomes.
So Indians living in rural parts actually spruced up purchases during the first festive months in October, November, and December, and corporate earnings of consumer companies also showed that uptick during that period.
But broadly, India's growth is slightly slowing down because the urban middle class is not spending as much as they were earlier.
The other element that has still been a drag despite the good numbers has been manufacturing and corporate investments.
In India, the manufacturing growth has been much slower versus the last year.
And Indian growth has been strong for some time?
Are there any worries that the economy might overheat at some point?
Is this level of growth sustainable?
Well, India's growth is already slowing down from its world beating 8 % plus rate that we were seeing till last year.
Like I mentioned, the middle class which had emerged as the main engine for consumer demand is feeling squeezed out now.
The wages have remained pretty much flat, savings have eroded.
In fact, there was a recent report which said that a billion Indians lack money to spend on any non -essential purchases.
Now, that's a very telling data to show how the consumption patterns in India are changing.
And that could be pulling down growth.
So most of the growth so far was driven largely by government spending and consumption from urban sites.
So that seems to be changing.
So it's a tricky time for India's growth story, though at 6 .2%, it is still ahead of most major economies in the world.
The BBC's Archana Shukla there in Mumbai.
Now, we've been waiting for this all week, but within the next hour, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is due to meet President Trump at the White House to sign an agreement that will give the US access to Ukraine's mineral resources.
The two men will be discussing how to end the war with Russia and whether the United States will offer security guarantees, such as air cover, to underpin any possible peace deal.
There's still a lot of confusion as to what this deal will actually amount to, but some Ukrainians have cautiously welcomed it.
Here's Lisa Yasko, a Ukrainian MP from President Zelensky's party.
The deal looks not bad and quite good for Ukraine, not only for the economic interest in general, but also for the future.
Because for us, it is very important that hopefully one day the war is over, that there will be different projects, different reconstruction, big projects that will help to restore our land, our society.
But there is unease about this deal.
Kira Rudik, another member of the Ukrainian parliament, but from a different party, said it wouldn't be easy to extract the country's minerals.
The majority of those rare minerals are in the temporary occupied territories.
This is the main thing right now And this is why we, of course, can promise them, but it will be really hard to get them.
So this is why we are saying the security guarantees first, not because we desperately want them, but also because from the business side, this is what is only opening those rare minerals for us and for future investigation.
And there have been some doubts raised about all this in the US itself.
Jim Hines is a Democrat member of the US Congress.
Now what is not clear is whether the Ukrainians do in fact get some sort of security guarantee to assure that the Russians won't use a period of peace to simply rearm and re -attack.
It's not clear how our allies will regard us going forward now that it appears that we are doing extortion and transactions rather than making principled stands against authoritarians and totalitarians.
Jim Hines there and as I say hopefully we'll get an idea of what this deal looks like within the next few hours so tune in to our later business programmes we'll hopefully be in a position to tell you more you're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now there's a sound you may have not heard for a while, the Skype ringtone.
But after kick -starting the market for making calls over the internet over 20 years ago, Microsoft, which owns Skype, has announced it will be retiring it in May to double down on its Teams app.
There'll still be plenty of ways for us to talk via the internet, but it does feel like the end of an era.
as Skype goes to the great app store in the sky.
Here to talk about Skype and its history is Tom Cheeswright, a futurologist based here in the UK.
Tom, it's easy to forget, but Skype was a real pioneer, wasn't it?
I mean, I remember when I first saw a friend of mine talking to a friend of hers on the other side of the world and we all sort of huddled around her laptop to see this.
It seemed like a miracle.
It was a real pioneer.
It's one of those technologies that took something that nerds were doing and brought it to the rest of the world.
Your voiceover IP, VoIP, was something that the telecoms industry was really excited about.
It was a new way of moving our voice communications over the much cheaper internet rather than the old fixed lines that used to carry it.
And then Skype comes along and makes it accessible to everybody in a really big way.
That ringtone became ubiquitous.
It became the way we spoke to friends and family overseas and up and down the country.
It became the way we carried on conversations while we were playing computer games or doing other things.
It really was a colossal part of internet culture for quite a long time.
And it did feel as though it had a monopoly, really, on this segment of the market for quite a long time before the likes of Zoom and Teams came along.
Absolutely. To the point where people were making dedicated Skype hardware.
I used to review gadgets for the BBC.
I had a Skype phone, a dedicated phone that could only make Skype calls.
I had a device that allowed you to plug it into your home phone socket and only use your home phone to make Skype calls if you really wanted to.
It was kind of ubiquitous.
And it's kind of weird in some ways that it didn't sustain that for longer.
That after its two acquisitions, firstly by eBay and then by Microsoft, that it didn't go on to use the scale of those organisations to really become dominant in the market.
Yeah. And it always seemed to me as though maybe it missed a trick at the start of the pandemic because we'd all been using Skype for quite a long time.
and as I say it seemed to have a monopoly on the segment, on the sector but then the pandemic came along and everyone was using Zoom and Teams.
The weird thing was it worked really well.
I actually think it was one of the better ways to do those calls whether it was one -to -one, one -to -many especially right at the start of the pandemic and it's actually only recently in the last six months that the last of my group chats which had existed on Skype for at least five years actually since the pandemic
has switched to a different platform.
It was very good. It was usable, possibly more usable, some might argue, than what is replacing it from the Microsoft stack, which is Teams.
Yeah. And as you suggested, it wasn't just about making calls to our friends.
It was also useful as a work tool for broadcasters in particular.
Absolutely. The sound quality was great.
It did a good job of processing video as well.
It was very usable for a number of functions.
But, you know, new things come along.
They catch the zeitgeist.
To Zoom became the verb rather than to Skype.
And so, you know, it sort of spread very, very quickly, particularly as a way for I think when you find something that's particularly easy to use.
Skype was good, but Zoom was a very quick way to get your relations who are less technical up and running.
And so migrated from a business environment to a consumer environment and therefore became the ubiquitous app through that extreme ease of use.
And do you think that Zoom and Teams are likely to now dominate the landscape over the next 10 years or so in the way that Skype did in a previous era?
I think that's unlikely.
I think what we'll probably see is all of this functionality is increasingly being just merged into the apps we already use.
People want to make a video call now.
They're as likely to use what's built into their iPhone or WhatsApp, something like that, rather than use a dedicated app.
Yes, Teams is deeply embedded in most of our business communications, but I can't see a lot of consumers adopting it for day to day use.
Are you sad to see Skype go?
I am a little bit. There aren't many pieces of technology that I have a bit of not nostalgia exactly, but attachment to.
But because it was the default sort of communications platform for so many of my friendship communications and communicating with the BBC as well, I'll be a little bit sad to see that icon disappear from my desktop.
Tom Chi's right. Great.
Thanks. Thanks very much for joining us.
Now, China's technology minister, Xinjiang Long, has been removed from office, seemingly as part of President Xi Jinping's anti -corruption purge.
This comes hours after the Financial Times reported that the minister hadn't been seen in public for two months.
I spoke to the FT's Beijing bureau chief, Zhou Leahy.
So far, no official confirmation as to why, but that's that's quite common with these sort of cases.
The government usually just puts out a one -liner saying that the person has been removed, and then it could take a couple of months even or longer for us to find out the real reason.
Our sources believe that he is involved in an anti -corruption investigation.
We don't know much more than that.
These things are kept very secret, but it's quite common for people to be abruptly removed from their office, and then we have to wait to find out the details.
And this all comes after your newspaper, the Financial Times, reported exclusively that he hadn't been seen in public for two months, which I guess is quite unusual for a minister with such a high profile beat as tech.
Yes, yeah, and this minister in particular, he's a very important minister with a very sort of distinguished career.
Just to put it into perspective, his ministry controls industrial policy on things like AI, semiconductors, telecommunications and EVs.
These are really the most important sectors for Xi Jinping at the moment, especially as the country competes with the US, if you like, in the tech war and in other areas.
And he also had a very distinguished career.
He was one of the people who helped develop the C919, China's first domestically produced passenger jet.
This is quite a shock for someone like this to just suddenly disappear.
And when you do get these unexplained disappearances by Chinese officials, historically, what does that usually mean?
Usually when people disappear like this, there is some sort of investigation behind it.
Occasionally, there might be a reason offered, such as health or even personal reasons, but it's very rare.
Usually what happens, they disappear, and then sometime later it emerges that they are involved in an anti -corruption investigation, and then after that, if they are sort of convicted or found guilty or whatever, we'll find out sometime later, even as much as a year later.
So these kinds of disappearances aren't uncommon.
And just to give you, put it into perspective, China's anti -corruption watchdog last year disciplined 889 ,000 officials.
And that was an increase of 46 % from the year before and the most in at least a decade.
So this anti -corruption drive is a key plank for Xi Jinping as he tries to drive the country forward.
And this minister is by no means the first minister to be removed from office.
yes yes there's been some very high profile other ministers removed including minister of defense agriculture and and most high profile of all was the foreign affairs minister ching gang who was removed again after one of these sort of absences from public so if even the foreign minister can sort of disappear
from public and be removed like this then anyone else is also at risk of sudden removal if they're found or accused of being involved in any sort of nefarious activities.
And Joe, any sense of who the next technology minister in China might be?
Yes, they've already announced his replacement.
It's a man called Li Lecheng.
And he was previously the governor of Liaoning province, which is one of the northeastern provinces.
And he seems to be in quite good stead.
He was seen with Xi Jinping actually last month on one of Xi Jinping's sort of events so that sort of bodes well for him for now but this position it's it's a difficult one the minister who has just replaced minister jin his predecessor was also removed so i think this is a quite a high profile and difficult
job joe leahy in beijing there take a look at the markets randeep somel is a fund manager at m &g investment management and joins me now randeep a pretty a pretty bleak day on the european markets and this seems to be down to those threats of tariffs against the EU from Donald Trump.
That's right. It doesn't look like the threats are going away anytime soon.
It looks as if early April may be a time when all EU exports into the US could be hit with a 25 % tariff.
And unfortunately so far, the president hasn't shown any sign of waning on that.
In fact, he's talking about an additional 10 % levy on tariffs he wants to apply to China.
And this seems to be especially hitting European car makers.
Why is that? That's right.
So for example, Stellanis was down nearly 7 % yesterday.
It's recovered a little bit today to just be about flat.
They have 45 % of their revenue coming from the US.
So some big brands there, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Peugeot, Suboxal, Citroën, are all within Stellanis and the car industry tends to get hit the hardest.
And it's hit Germany's share price today, Volkswagen's share price today as well, down around 1 .8%.
Mercedes -Benz down about 2 .6%.
And Porsche nearly 4 % down.
So carmakers have been really badly hit.
But the Trump tariff announcement has hit other sectors as well, hasn't it?
It has. We're seeing it across the board, really, in industrials as well, as the concern just heats up.
If this tariff goes into effect, it's around about 1 .5 % of EU GDP.
So it will filter down to everything else, including the consumer.
But one bright spot, the UK.
Indeed. For once, we can talk about something positive.
President Trump is beginning to talk about the U .K.-U .S.
trade deal that could come into effect.
He is now of the opinion that the U .S.
in his own words, sorry, the U .K.
in his own words, isn't ripping the U .S.
off. We have relatively balanced trade, i .e.
we export to each other roughly the same amount.
So not only will we be immune from any tariffs that come into effect, but potentially we may actually see that free trade deal with the U .S.
go ahead. And the FTSE has been outperforming other European markets today.
It has. It's up about nearly 50 basis points today and the industrials are leading the charge.
We've also had German CPI data.
What did that show us?
It actually rolls. We were expecting it to come off a little bit, but it's up to 2 .8%.
So it's proving to be a bit more stubborn and it's mainly, of course, energy prices remain elevated across all of Europe, but especially in Germany as well, given they're not getting the Russian gas that they once did.
This has implications that it's unlikely that ECB will be able to reduce rates if inflation remains elevated and therefore not providing that sort of valve for the economy to spur some economic growth.
And just the reminder that the German economy is in negative growth at the moment.
And just briefly, Bitcoin, Randip, it's been up and down as it always is, but down at the moment, back below $80 ,000.
It is. It's almost now back to the level that it was when President Trump celebrated his victory early November of last year.
I always find Bitcoin pretty difficult.
There's not really a valuation anchor on where the price should be.
So it does move around on sentiment a fair amount.
Randy Psonil from M &G Investment Management, thanks for joining us.
Now. That's part of the trailer for the Indian movie Sam Bahadur.
Now, most of us have been to the movies and got frustrated at how many adverts and trailers are shown before the main event gets started.
But one man who went to see Sam Bahadur got so annoyed at the delayed start time that he's taken one of India's largest cinema multiplex chains, PVR, to court.
And Abhishek MR, a lawyer from Bangalore, has won his case.
I've been speaking to him and I started by asking him why he went to the effort of suing the cinema chain.
I booked three tickets for me and my family for a 4 .05pm show of a very famous Hindi movie called Sam Bahadur way back in December 2023.
The movie, as per the ticket, was scheduled to begin at 4 .05pm.
However, until 4 .28pm, the movie did not start.
Instead of playing the movie, the cinema, that is the PVR cinema, masked engaged in playing series of commercial advertisements around 17 commercial advertisements and two pieces what we call as public service announcements so i was totally frustrated by this unfair trade practice being carried out
by the mas because they've totally violated the consumer laws they've totally taken the consumer for a ride so i had planned my whole schedule in such a way that i would be able to take my work calls at 6 30 p .m because the movie was supposed to end by 6 .30pm.
Eventually, the movie concluded only by around 7pm.
So there were around 30 minutes of encroachment of my time, if I may say so, in legal parlance.
Almost every moviegoer in India, I'm sure, has experienced this situation.
But I decided at that moment, probably I should take this on a bigger platform, where I should ensure that, you know, other cinemas don't misuse consumers' time.
And there is some proactive action taken by cinemas to stop this unfair trade practice.
And you took the company to court.
The company is PVR, which is one of India's largest cinema chains.
Correct. And the result was?
So I had sought for damages of some of rupees 50 ,000.
About 550 US dollars.
Yeah, for mental agony and mental distress for myself, the damages for me.
And the second leg of my claim was to ensure there's a penalty levied on the cinemas for carrying on unsite trade practice.
And yes, of course, 30 days time is granted for PVA to comply with the order.
We'll have to wait and watch.
Okay, so you won your court case.
And I expect a lot of people listening to this will think, well, we all know that there are always adverts in a cinema before films start.
Right. So shouldn't you take that into account when you booked your ticket?
Well, Gideon, in India, when you're given a ticket and the ticket says the show will begin at 4 or 5 p .m., it is supposed to begin at 4 or 5 p .m.
And whatever advertisements they have to play or any trailer of a movie or anything else has to be played before 4 or 5 p .m.
That's the scheduled start of the show.
And there are certain guidelines laid down by the Ministry of Broadcasting, where they clearly laid down the guidelines, which clearly says only 10 minutes prior to the start of the show can these PSAs be played.
That can be played only for 10 minutes before the start of the show.
But why did nobody pay attention to this?
cinemas were taking consumers for a ride because nobody questioned this at any point of time.
So you're saying that these adverts should have been showed before 4 .05pm when the film was supposed to start.
That's right. I guess the other thing that people might say is, well, you know, you could have just left the cinema early to make your appointments.
Not ideal, obviously, because it means you miss the end of the film, but you could have kept those appointments.
Yeah, of course. That was always a point of contention.
But two and a half hours was the actual duration of the movie.
And they're not supposed to cross that duration of the movie by taking your time for granted, you know.
If this is allowed freely, then I think each of the cinema will have their own durations, their own regulations and whatever, you know, they want, they can play at any time.
So there won't be any adherence to the laws of the land.
It's totally worth it, worth every minute I've spent in the Consumer Commission, considering the astounding impact the news has been making across not just India, but across the globe.
I'm sure that, you know, not just PVR as a cinema house, but every other business in India has been discussing about how to not waste consumers' time and how to respect consumers' time.
Abhishek, Emma Arda, who won that court case.
Well, Randeep Somal from M &G Investment Management is still with me.
Randeep, have you ever missed a business appointment because you've been stuck in the cinema?
I haven't. I tend to go to cinemas at the weekend.
So you have a lot more free time then rather than trying to fit it into the working week.
Do you think you might have a point, though, because most events, you go to a sports event, then you know exactly what time it's going to start.
You do. I mean, I actually quite enjoy going to the cinema and watching the trailers, so you know if there's anything good coming out afterwards.
Yeah, some people do enjoy the adverts.
They go especially early to see them.
Thanks very much for joining us, Randeep.
And that's all we have time for from this edition of World Business Report.
