Apple is Failing ? : The TRUTH Apple Doesn’t Want You to Know | Business Case study

Hello everybody,
For almost a decade, one company controlled 90% of India’s airport lounge access.
Then, in just a few months, 90% of its market value vanished.

This is the story of how DreamFolks quietly built a ₹2,000 crore empire  and how Adani brought it crashing down almost overnight.

The Invisible Empire Nobody Knew About:

If you’ve travelled through any Indian airport in the past few years, you probably know the best hack:

Swipe your credit card → walk into the lounge → enjoy free food, AC, coffee, and peace.

But here’s the twist:

Behind this comfort was a company most Indians never heard of, DreamFolks Services.

For nearly a decade, DreamFolks was the invisible giant of Indian aviation. It was the country’s biggest lounge aggregator, commanding a staggering 90% market share. It clocked over ₹2,000 crore in revenue simply by deciding who got to sit in that comfortable chair

And then, in a matter of months it collapsed by 90%

So, how did a company with a near monopoly lose everything so fast?

To understand the collapse, you first have to understand the genius of the business model.

Running an airport lounge sounds glamorous, but logistically, it is a nightmare.

The Lounge’s Problem: 

Imagine you run a lounge at Mumbai Airport. To fill seats, you need customers. But customers carry cards from dozens of different banks (HDFC, SBI, Axis) and different networks (Visa, Mastercard, RuPay).

• Bank A pays ₹400 per visit.

• Bank B pays ₹350.

• Platinum cards get free access; Gold cards don't.

Managing hundreds of separate contracts and tech integrations with every bank in India is impossible.

The Bank’s Problem: 

Now, imagine you are HDFC Bank. You want to offer lounge access to your customers globally. You can’t possibly sign individual deals with every single lounge operator (like TFS, Encalm, or Plaza Premium) at every single airport (run by GMR, GVK, or Adani).

The system was fragmented, messy, and broken.

The DreamFolks Solution: 

DreamFolks stepped in as the Universal Adapter. They built a single tech layer that connected everyone.

• Banks signed one contract with DreamFolks.

• Lounges installed one DreamFolks scanner.

It was a frictionless money machine. Here is the unit economics of a single swipe:

It was the perfect middleman position. They were so valuable to both sides that neither could afford to work without them.

Until September 2024.

The Collapse:

DreamFolks’ entire verification system went down.

For three days, chaos hit Indian airports, scanners froze, lounges shut people out, staff didn’t know who was eligible, travellers lined up with no clarity.

This outage exposed the biggest risk:

India’s entire lounge ecosystem depended on ONE company.

And that made powerful players start asking:

“Why do we even need this middleman?”

One player took that question very seriously, 

Adani Airport Holdings (which owns seven major airports including Mumbai, Ahmedabad, and Lucknow) realized something simple.

Adani owns the airport. Adani often owns lounges. Adani has the capital to build an app. Why let DreamFolks take a cut of every transaction when Adani could simply copy the DreamFolks playbook 

If DreamFolks was pocketing ₹6 on every visit, Adani could now split that profit with the lounge operator or airport , offer a cheaper deal, and cut DreamFolks out entirely.

On July 3rd, Arun Bansal, the CEO of Adani Airport Holdings, made a seemingly routine announcement. 

Passengers could now book lounge access directly through the Adani Digital app instead of using DreamFolks. He casually mentioned it would cut out the "middlemen" and "intermediaries."

What he didn't say, but what the industry heard loud and clear, was a declaration of war against aggregators

Soon, two things happened:

1. Adani pushed its platform Adani one:

Owning key airports like Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, and Jaipur, Adani began urging banks to use their direct system, cutting aggregators out completely. Reports even suggested that banks were told their cardholders might lose access if they didn’t switch.

2. Key partners fled:
Major lounge operators like Encalm and big banks like Axis and ICICI quietly scaled back or ended their contracts with DreamFolks.

The final blow was when DreamFolks went to the courts hoping to protect its turf. But in a critical verdict, the Delhi High Court ruled that DreamFolks didn’t have any exclusive contracts meaning operators and banks were free to work directly.

That decision shattered DreamFolks’ claim of being indispensable. The takedown was swift and brutal.

Within months, DreamFolks’ stock crashed by over 90%, wiping out nearly all of its market value.

Liberatha Peter Kallat, the founder of DreamFolks, accused airport operators of "corporate arm-twisting," alleging that banks were threatened with service disruptions if they didn't dump DreamFolks.

But Arun Bansal calls it the "natural next step in India’s fintech revolution."

Both are right.

The DreamFolks story teaches us the most brutal lesson in business: The "Middleman's Dilemma."

Middlemen (aggregators) are kings when a market is fragmented and messy. They create order from chaos. But once the market matures and consolidates, especially when a big player like Adani enters, the middleman becomes irrelevant.