Brands
14,000 tonnes in a day: Blue Dart’s logistics feats that defined 2025
From vaccines to parcels, 2025 shows India moving faster, farther, and smarter
MUMBAI: Blue Dart Express, South Asia’s leading express logistics provider and part of the DHL Group, has unveiled its first-ever annual delivery trends report, India on the Move 2025. The outlook offers a fascinating glimpse into how India shipped, moved, and consumed goods over the year.
2025 was a year of motion, from life-saving vaccines colder than Antarctica to parcels racing across the country faster than most can binge a web series. The report goes beyond tonnes and kilometres, spotlighting the moments that mattered: critical documents that couldn’t wait, shipments doubling overnight, and packages connecting families, businesses, and the economy at an unprecedented scale.
Key highlights include a record-breaking day in July when more than 14,000 tonnes were moved, 20 peak days where shipments doubled the daily average, and 47 million parcels delivered safely. If placed end-to-end, these parcels could wrap around India’s coastline multiple times.
India’s logistics network covered over 2 billion kilometres by road alone, equivalent to 2,600 trips to the Moon or 50,000 trips around the Earth. The backbone of this movement is Blue Dart’s 399,000 sq. metres of logistics infrastructure, supporting everything from sensitive medical shipments to vital financial documents.
Some deliveries pushed the limits of extremes: the highest delivery reached Leh, Ladakh at 3,500 metres, while the coldest shipment transported veterinary vaccines at minus 196°C. Blue Dart’s specialised logistics also ensured safe movement of insulin, blood and plasma, cell and gene therapies, and heart valves.
Digital transformation sped things up too. Businesses can now open a paperless shipping account in just 90 seconds, enabling them to start moving goods almost immediately. Tier-2 cities emerged as the engine of growth, accounting for a 60 per cent surge in demand, driven by SMEs, D2C brands, and digitally savvy entrepreneurs.
Behind the network are people with decades of expertise. Blue Dart has 626 employees with over 25 years of experience each, contributing 15,650 cumulative years of knowledge to keep deliveries reliable.
The takeaway? In 2025, India moved more than parcels: it moved trust, ambition, healthcare, and livelihoods. Blue Dart kept the nation delivering, every day, everywhere.
Brands
UK’s OnlyFans seeks US investor at $3bn valuation after owner’s death
The adult video platform is seeking stability after the death of its billionaire owner
LONDON: OnlyFans is looking for a new partner. The London-based adult video platform is in advanced talks to sell a minority stake of less than 20 per cent to Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based investment firm, in a deal that would value the business at more than $3bn (£2.2bn).
The move is driven by an urgent need for stability. Leonid Radvinsky, the Ukrainian-American billionaire who owned OnlyFans, died of cancer last month at the age of 43, leaving the future of one of Britain’s most profitable privately held businesses suddenly uncertain.
The choice of Architect Capital is not arbitrary. The firm has deep expertise in financial services, which aligns neatly with OnlyFans’ ambitions to offer banking products to its creators, many of whom have long struggled to access basic financial services because of the nature of their work.
The numbers behind OnlyFans are, by any measure, staggering. The platform posted revenues of $1.4bn in the year to 30th November 2024, with a pre-tax profit of $684m, up four per cent on the prior year. Payments to creators totalled $7.2bn over the same period, a rise of nearly ten per cent. Radvinsky personally collected $701m in dividends from the business in 2024 alone, on top of more than $1bn in such payments he had already received. The platform, run through its parent company Felix International, hosts 4.6m creator accounts, with performers keeping 80 per cent of subscription proceeds and the platform pocketing the remaining 20 per cent. It has 377m fan accounts in total.
The current minority stake talks represent a notable scaling back of ambitions. In January, OnlyFans was reported to be in discussions with Architect about selling a majority stake of 60 per cent. Before that, the company had explored a sale to a consortium led by Forest Road Company, a Los Angeles-based investment firm. Neither deal materialised.
OnlyFans has built an enormously lucrative business on content that mainstream finance has long refused to touch. Now, with its owner gone and a $3bn valuation on the table, it is looking for the kind of respectable institutional backing that might finally persuade the banks to take its calls.
