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The Al Hamra, operated by ADNOC Logistics & Services, was tracked leaving the Gulf with a cargo headed towards western India after weeks of restricted tanker movements through the narrow waterway. The vessel had stopped transmitting its position around April 19, when it was empty and near the eastern entrance of Hormuz, before reappearing with indications that it had loaded and moved through the passage.

The shipment is significant because it points to a cautious reopening of Gulf energy trade for selected cargoes, even as shipping remains constrained by security checks, insurance costs and uncertainty over whether the waterway can return to normal operations. The Strait of Hormuz links the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, making it the most sensitive maritime route for Gulf oil and gas exports to Asia.

For India, the transit offers limited relief after weeks of pressure on energy logistics. The country relies heavily on imported LNG to supply fertiliser plants, city gas networks, refineries, power producers and industrial users. Western India, where several import terminals are located, is a critical landing point for Gulf cargoes because of its proximity to major gas-consuming states and pipeline networks.

The war that began on February 28 led to a sharp fall in tanker traffic through Hormuz, leaving ships idle inside the Gulf and forcing buyers to consider alternative cargoes from outside the region. LNG, crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas flows were all affected, with importers seeking supplies from the United States, Africa and Southeast Asia where available. The disruption came at a sensitive time for Asian buyers, with summer demand rising and spot cargoes becoming more costly.

Around one-fifth of global LNG trade passes through Hormuz in normal conditions. Qatar is the dominant LNG exporter through the route, while the UAE also ships cargoes from its Das Island facility. Asia receives the overwhelming share of Hormuz-linked LNG, with China, India and South Korea among the leading destinations. Any sustained restriction therefore has an immediate effect on Asian gas pricing and supply planning.

India’s LNG import system has expanded over the past decade, but dependence on seaborne supply remains a strategic vulnerability. The country has operational terminals at Dahej, Hazira, Dabhol, Kochi, Ennore, Mundra and Dhamra, with combined capacity of nearly 48 million tonnes a year. Dahej in Gujarat remains the most important facility, serving fertiliser units, refineries, power plants and city gas distributors across northern and western markets.

The Al Hamra movement follows earlier signs that limited LNG traffic had resumed through the chokepoint. The Mubaraz, another LNG tanker linked to the UAE, crossed out of the Gulf in late April after weeks of inactivity, becoming the first loaded LNG shipment to exit Hormuz since the conflict began. A second ADNOC-linked LNG tanker followed in early May, showing that Gulf suppliers were testing the scope for controlled departures.

Shipping executives and energy traders remain cautious, however. Vessel owners are facing higher war-risk premiums, tighter routing decisions and uncertainty over whether transponders should remain active in conflict-sensitive waters. Some tankers have switched off tracking systems for security reasons, making it harder for buyers and market participants to confirm loading and transit details in real time.

India has also been dealing with pressure in LPG supply, a politically sensitive segment because of household cooking fuel demand. Several LPG cargoes linked to India were stranded or delayed after the Hormuz disruption, prompting authorities to prioritise the return of ships already inside the Gulf before sending more vessels into the area. That approach reflects a broader effort to balance energy security with crew safety and insurance exposure.

Petrol in New Delhi rose by 87 paise to ₹99.51 a litre, while diesel increased by 91 paise to ₹92.49 a litre. The latest increase takes the cumulative rise in both fuels to about ₹5 a litre this month, following the first retail fuel price increase since April 2022.

The pricing move reflects mounting pressure on oil marketing companies as international crude benchmarks remain elevated amid conflict in West Asia and supply concerns around key shipping routes. The controlled increases also point to a calibrated approach by the government, which is seeking to protect refiners’ balance sheets without delivering a sharp one-time shock to household budgets, freight operators and small businesses.

Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation dominate the retail fuel market, operating more than 90 per cent of the country’s roughly 103,000 fuel stations. Their pricing decisions carry wide implications for transport costs, food supply chains, inflation expectations and fiscal calculations.

The latest revision follows a ₹3-a-litre increase on May 15 and another smaller increase during the week, marking a clear shift from the long freeze that had shielded consumers from global volatility while pushing losses onto state-run refiners. That freeze had become harder to sustain as crude prices climbed and the rupee’s movement added to import costs.

The country imports more than four-fifths of its crude oil requirements, leaving domestic retail prices exposed to global oil markets and exchange-rate swings. Refiners have been selling petrol and diesel at discounted rates relative to landed costs, with diesel under-recoveries remaining larger because of its central role in freight, agriculture, public transport and industry.

Losses on diesel sales have been estimated at ₹25-30 a litre even after the first hike, while petrol losses have been placed at about ₹10-14 a litre. The fresh increase narrows that gap only modestly, suggesting further upward revisions could follow if crude prices stay high or the currency weakens.

Diesel is the more sensitive fuel for the broader economy. It powers trucks, buses, farm equipment, construction machinery and a large part of the country’s goods movement. Even modest increases can feed into freight rates, especially for smaller fleet operators with limited capacity to absorb higher running costs.

Petrol demand has also stayed firm, supported by urban commuting, two-wheeler use and private vehicle ownership. April consumption data showed petrol sales at about 3.7 million tonnes, up more than 6 per cent from a year earlier, while gasoil sales stood near 8.3 million tonnes, marginally higher than last year. The numbers indicate that demand has not weakened sharply despite higher living costs.

Bulk fuel demand has added another layer of pressure. Large users such as transport operators, mining companies and industrial consumers often respond quickly to price differences between retail outlets and direct industrial supply. A spike in retail buying can worsen supply imbalances and deepen losses for refiners if pump prices remain below market-linked levels.

The government has so far signalled little appetite for direct subsidies to compensate refiners for continuing under-recoveries. That stance increases the likelihood of gradual price adjustments, particularly if global crude remains above levels assumed in company projections. A sudden subsidy programme would also complicate fiscal planning at a time when public spending priorities remain stretched across infrastructure, welfare and defence.

State-level taxes mean consumers across major cities will see different pump prices even when the base increase is broadly similar. Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad typically record higher retail rates than New Delhi because of local levies, dealer commissions and freight costs. That variation also affects inflation differently across regions.

Compressed natural gas prices have moved higher as well, with Delhi seeing another ₹1-per-kg increase, the third rise in ten days. The parallel increase in CNG adds pressure on taxis, autorickshaws and urban commuters who had shifted to gas-based transport as a cheaper alternative to petrol and diesel.

For oil marketing companies, the price increases may support margins but are unlikely to restore full profitability immediately. Investor attention is now focused on how quickly the companies can recover past losses, whether demand holds up, and whether policymakers allow market-linked pricing to continue if inflationary pressure grows.

Revenue Up 35.4% Year-on-Year API Token Call Volume Surges Nearly 6 Times

HONG KONG SAR – Media OutReach Newswire – 22 May 2026 – Phancy Group Co., Ltd. (“Phancy” or “The Company”, stock code: 6682.HK), a leading general artificial intelligence company, today announced its unaudited consolidated results for the first quarter ended 31 March 2026.

During the period, Phancy achieved revenue of approximately RMB1.458 billion, representing a 35.4% year-on-year increase. Gross profit margin remained at 35.1%. Phancy leveraged its deep expertise in full-stack AI cloud services, to capitalize on the accelerating adoption of localized computing power and strong enterprise demand for AI solutions. The Company achieved robust growth in its core businesses, accelerated product innovation, and secured several major partnerships, sustaining strong operational momentum.

2026 First Quarter Business Highlights:

Unified Enterprise AI Platform Drives Explosive Core Business Growth

Global computing resources remain constrained, while demand for both private enterprise AI deployments and API-based model calls continues to grow rapidly. Phancy’s enterprise-grade AI platform is built on a unified core architecture that seamlessly supports both API calling scenarios and dedicated private deployments. This significantly boosts AI application efficiency and resource utilization. Supported by a mature computing power supply chain developed over many years, Phancy’s deployable computing power resources have increased by over 200%. This enables the Company to effectively meet surging Token demand and consistently deliver stable, high-quality AI services to its customers.

In the first quarter of 2026, API Token call volume surged nearly 6 times compared to the same period in 2025, and already accounted for nearly 40% of the full-year 2025 total. Meanwhile, the Agentic AI business expanded rapidly, with deepening commercial adoption. Orders on hand grew nearly 100% compared to the end of 2025, emerging as a major growth driver for the Company.

AI Technology Iteration Accelerates, Commercialization Beats Expectations

Building on its continued push into digital employee applications and AI empowerment across business units, Phancy has significantly shortened the product development cycle from R&D to commercialization, enhancing overall operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

As of mid-May 2026, ModelHub XC has completed adaptation and optimization for over 70,000 AI models on domestic chips, achieving more than 70% of its full-year target – well ahead of schedule.

In May, Phancy launched PhanthyMovie, a professional-grade AI video generation platform designed to enhance creativity, control, and stability in video production, enabling standardized and large-scale content creation for the industry.

Leveraging its advanced technology and proven execution capabilities, PhanthyMovie achieved rapid commercial traction. Just days after launch, the Company entered into a strategic cooperation agreement with Huanxi Media, covering approximately US$200 million in AI Token usage. The two parties will also collaborate on the development of a next-generation AI-powered film and television content production platform, further strengthening Phancy’s position in the AI-driven cultural and creative sector.

Core Products Align Closely with Policy Trends, Strengthening Compute-Model Integration

Since May 2026, China’s AI sector has seen a series of positive policy developments focused on computing infrastructure, data element circulation, and open-source compliance governance. Phancy’s core products, including HAMi vGPU and ModelHub XC, are well-aligned with national policy directions and mainstream industry trends.

In terms of computing resource allocation, policies emphasize cross-regional collaboration and broader access to computing power. Phancy’s HAMi vGPU offers unified scheduling and fine-grained resource partitioning, effectively improving utilization rates, optimizing data center energy efficiency, and supporting unified management across multiple chips to boost single-card efficiency.

In data and model governance, the government continues to promote high-quality dataset development and compliance management. ModelHub XC supports multi-model adaptation and optimization, incorporates data traceability and security certification features to help enterprises reduce compliance risks, and uses the EngineX engine for batch adaptation of domestic chips and models. This significantly improves compatibility while enhancing Token output efficiency through targeted model tuning.

Through deep integration of its computing and model layers, Phancy has built a comprehensive “Compute–Model” integrated solution. This addresses key industry needs such as efficient computing utilization, secure data supply, enterprise compliance, and domestic substitution, while strengthening its technological moat. The Company is well positioned to capture policy dividends and industry opportunities, supporting enterprises in their digital and intelligent transformation.

Hashtag: #PhancyGroup

The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement.

About Phancy Group

Phancy Group (6682.HK) is a leading full-stack AI cloud services platform, providing comprehensive solutions for the AI 2.0 era. Our offerings include SageAIOS, HAMi vGPU and ModelHub XC, delivering efficient and scalable AI infrastructure with end-to-end capabilities. We provide a complete solution from heterogeneous compute resource management and optimization to the deployment of intelligent agent models. These solutions empower digital transformation across a wide range of industries, supporting our vision of building a large-scale and efficient “Token Factory.”

Guided by the mission of “AI for Everyone” and positioned as the “Navigator of AI,” Phancy Group is committed to becoming a global leader in Artificial General Intelligence.

The Cockroach Janta Party, a social media-driven collective built around humour, mock manifestos and political parody, has surged across Instagram, X and short-video platforms within days of its launch. What began as an online response to courtroom remarks by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has become a wider expression of frustration over jobs, living costs, institutional distrust and the limited space many young citizens feel they have in public debate.

The phrase took off after remarks during a Supreme Court hearing on May 15, when the bench was dealing with a petition linked to the designation of a lawyer as Senior Advocate. Comments referring to some unemployed young people, social media users, media figures and RTI activists as “cockroaches” and “parasites” triggered anger online. Justice Surya Kant later said he had been misquoted and clarified that his criticism was directed at people using fake or bogus degrees to enter professions, not at the youth of the country.

By then, the phrase had already escaped the courtroom. Memes, posters, mock campaign material and parody slogans began circulating at high speed. The Cockroach Janta Party, widely abbreviated as CJP, framed itself as the “voice of the lazy and unemployed”, turning a disparaging label into a collective identity. Its creator, Abhijeet Dipke, a 30-year-old based in Boston, positioned the project as peaceful, satirical and democracy-oriented rather than a conventional political outfit.

The scale of the online response has been striking. The group’s Instagram presence crossed the 10 million mark and was later reported to be nearing 15 million followers, temporarily putting it ahead of several established political accounts in visibility. More than 400,000 people were said to have signed up through its online channels, with a large share of participants falling in the 19–25 age group. The numbers also triggered scepticism, with claims that overseas users or bots had inflated the following. Dipke rejected the allegations, saying the overwhelming majority of followers were from India.

The movement’s appeal lies partly in its absurdity. A creature usually associated with dirt, survival and infestation has been reimagined as a metaphor for resilience. Supporters have used the cockroach to signal that a generation facing unstable work, high rents, exam pressure and limited upward mobility is refusing to disappear. The image has proved adaptable: it works as a meme, a protest costume, a party logo and a joke that can carry political weight without sounding like a formal campaign speech.

That flexibility has helped the trend move beyond online humour. Young volunteers in Delhi dressed as cockroaches while taking part in a Yamuna clean-up activity near Kalindi Kunj, linking the meme to civic action. Satirical spin-offs, including rival parody groups, appeared almost immediately. The trend also crossed borders, with users in Pakistan and Bangladesh adapting similar cockroach-themed political humour to their own domestic frustrations.

The timing has sharpened its resonance. Youth unemployment in the 15–29 age group stood at 9.9 per cent in 2025, with the urban youth rate higher at 13.6 per cent. A formal decline from the previous year has not erased anxiety among graduates and first-time job seekers, many of whom say the labour market offers either low salaries, insecure contracts or intense competition for public-sector posts. Inflation in housing, education and transport has added to the strain.

Gen Z’s political language in India is also changing. Earlier protest cultures relied heavily on student unions, party fronts, street marches and television visibility. The new pattern begins on reels, memes and comment threads, where humour lowers the cost of participation and helps users test political ideas before attaching their real identities to them. The Cockroach Janta Party sits within that shift: it is not a registered party with electoral machinery, but it has generated a recognisable symbol, a support base and a vocabulary of dissent.

A 2026 software supply chain security assessment shows that about 65 per cent of organisations in India cannot detect malicious packages, while 71 per cent do not use container security tools. The findings underline a widening gap between the speed of AI-led software development and the controls needed to secure code, dependencies, models and deployment pipelines before they reach production systems.

Security teams are facing a more complex threat environment as AI coding assistants, model registries, agent frameworks and machine-learning libraries become embedded in day-to-day software engineering. AI is no longer confined to application features or analytics layers. It is becoming part of the software supply chain itself, influencing how code is written, tested, packaged and deployed.

Enterprises in India have been quick to adopt AI tools to improve developer productivity, reduce repetitive work and accelerate product releases. Yet the same shift has increased reliance on open-source packages, pre-trained models, plug-ins and automated build systems. Each of these components can introduce hidden risks if provenance, integrity and behaviour are not continuously verified.

Global software repositories are now attracting sustained attacks because they provide a direct route into enterprise development environments. Malicious npm packages rose by 451 per cent during 2025, while more than 48,000 new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures were disclosed worldwide, a rise of about 20 per cent from the previous year.

The pressure on security teams is being amplified by the volume of AI-generated code. Developers in India are spending about 51 per cent of their time reviewing, validating and hardening code produced by AI tools. About 53 per cent treat such output only as a starting point and review every line before use, while 11 per cent rewrite AI-generated fixes from scratch.

This shift has altered the economics of software engineering. AI may reduce the time needed to draft code, but it can also transfer effort to verification, testing and security review. Weaknesses such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection and missing authorisation checks can still be reproduced by automated tools, particularly when developers rely on generated code without adequate scrutiny.

Governance is emerging as another area of concern. Nearly 97 per cent of organisations surveyed said they had certified AI model governance programmes, but only 59 per cent claimed full provenance visibility across production environments. About 48 per cent still needed a week or longer to produce audit-ready compliance evidence.

That gap points to a difference between policy and enforceable control. Many enterprises have AI governance frameworks on paper, but fewer can prove where every model, library, container image and software artefact came from, how it changed, who approved it and whether it complies with internal policy.

CERT-In has also warned that software supply chain compromises are increasingly targeting developer tools and trusted repositories. Its April 2026 activity note referred to attacks affecting npm, PyPI, GitHub Actions and container registries, including incidents involving Checkmarx, Trivy, LiteLLM, Axios, Telnyx and npm packages linked to the CanisterWorm campaign. The payloads observed in these attacks included credential harvesting, data exfiltration, remote execution and persistence within developer systems.

Model registries have added another layer to the risk. Around 1.4 million new AI artefacts were published on Hugging Face during 2025, representing 58 per cent of all new software packages tracked in one assessment. Researchers identified 495 malicious AI models in public repositories with active payloads capable of credential theft, command execution and reverse-shell activity, along with 969 malicious AI-agent skills designed to exploit developer environments and automation workflows.

For enterprises in India, the challenge is sharpened by the country’s role as a major software engineering and global capability centre hub. Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Gurugram host large engineering teams serving banking, retail, telecoms, manufacturing and cloud services. These centres are increasingly responsible not only for maintenance work but also for product development, AI integration and security-sensitive digital platforms.

Regulatory and customer expectations are also tightening. Buyers are asking for software bills of materials, vulnerability disclosure processes, provenance records and proof that build pipelines are protected. CERT-In’s technical guidance on SBOM, QBOM, CBOM, AIBOM and HBOM has emphasised regular updates, vulnerability exploitability exchange documents and staff training around software supply chain visibility.

Security leaders are therefore moving towards stronger controls across development pipelines. These include automated malicious package detection, container image scanning, secrets detection, signed artefacts, dependency pinning, model provenance checks, policy enforcement in CI/CD systems and continuous monitoring of developer environments.

The investment case is becoming harder to ignore. Software supply chain attacks can bypass perimeter defences because they enter through trusted development channels. Once inside, malicious packages can steal credentials, alter builds, move into cloud environments or compromise downstream customers. AI raises the stakes because it can accelerate both legitimate development and attacker experimentation.