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Market summary: 📊
After a couple solid sessions, Indian markets crawled back a bit on Wednesday. US had a mixed day, with mainstream companies losing, and growth tech advancing.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.29%
Nasdaq - up 0.15%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.52%
Sensex - down 0.58%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Survivors are thriving—the retail apocalypse is more or less over. Old school retailers who weren’t crushed by Amazon’s assault so far are in fact slowly thriving, successfully managing omnichannel operations thanks to COVID offered tailwinds. Last night, world’s No.2 retailer Walmart reported its quarterly numbers—a blow out beat, that saw the $400B retailer grow revenues by 6% to $138 billion. Most importantly e-commerce revenues in the US were up 37%, while ecommerce globally was up 47%—which also includes Flipkart.
✅ This party looking bad—Google’s self driving baby, Waymo, which just lost 6 of its key execs last month, including the CFO most recently, is now out to raise $4 billion from outside investors as bills keep piling up, while no revenues come through the door. Like we mentioned before, the problem of autonomous AI is becoming harder and harder to solve, while on the other hand Google CFO Ruth Porat is cracking the whip on all money losing shenanigans. Meanwhile Elon out here promising people 100% self driving by Friday….
Adani gobbles SB Energy 💰
Adani Green Energy purchased all India based assets of SB Energy, a diversified global renewable energy player, from Masa Son’s Softbank in a $3.5 billion transaction yesterday.
Chase to meet targets—Adani Green Energy, which has been on a monstrous growth streak for the past couple years, is basically chasing a 25GW clean energy production capacity target it promised shareholders by 2025, acquiring and operating a diverse set of assets including massive wind farms, solar energy projects.
SB Energy meanwhile owns about 4.9 GW of renewable portfolio spread across four states in India, with 84% capacity in solar, with the rest in wind, and wind-solar hybrid. All of that will now accelerate Adani’s progress.
Masa Son probably would’ve never sold, but we’re guessing the recent windfalls in tech IPOs have reminded the man how he’s exceptionally talented at the software game than anything else.
Bottomline—in the last 12 months alone, Adani Green stock has 5x’ed, supported by strong tailwinds in the green energy production sector, as India chases the promise of diversifying away from coal. Still a long way to go, which makes the stock look all the more exciting.
Time to burst that bubble 🙄
Tesla’s cybertruck, the ungodly looking four wheeled creature that Musk began taking bookings for 4 years ago, and hasn’t yet delivered, just got some serious competition.
Ford, the low-key (and not so meme-y) $60 billion old school auto giant, yesterday unveiled its first fully electric pickup truck, the Ford F-150. Ford calls it lightning—beyond electric.
Nobody would’ve cared as much but then the unveiling was done by Biden himself, who took the car for a spin on Ford’s testing facility in Dearborn Michigan, and to be honest, for a 78 year old guy, Biden looked pretty neat behind that wheel.
Why it matters so much—the F-150 pickup truck is the best selling vehicle in the US, leading the market for over 43 years now.
When that car completes an EV transformation, the market has finally come of age. Tesla may be the pioneer of EVs, but it wasn’t going to be the one bringing them to the mass market, and this finally may be the moment when mass adoption finally kicks off in the US.
Big picture—Tesla delivered 500K cars in 2020, and is valued at $550 billion. Ford delivered 4.2 million (nearly 9x more) cars last year, and is valued at exactly $47 billion. That basically makes no sense!
And please don’t throw that Tesla-is-a-software company BS...
Meanwhile, Michael Burry’s $500 million bet that Tesla stock is overvalued just started to make a lot of sense.
PhonePe is playing 3D chess ♟️
What’s happening—PhonePe, the UPI and merchant payments company owned by Walmart and Flipkart, is apparently looking to purchase Indus OS, an Indian mobile operating system company, for about $60 million.
Indus OS, a locally made operating system, has an installed base of nearly 100 million users in India, mostly in the low priced smartphone range. The company also runs a robust app marketplace with more than 400K apps there, across 12+ languages.
While the exact agenda remains unwrapped, we’re guessing PhonePe is optimistic about integrating its payment apps and services as default tools on the OS, for the 100 million and more users especially in emerging Bharath, while at the same time making the devices ideal to double up as payment processing terminals for merchants.
Cozy relationships with OEM partners (think Samsung, Vivo, and the others) to perhaps factory-equip phones with PhonePe wallets and other services could also be intriguing.
Big picture—the payments (PhonePe) + commerce (commerce) + hardware-via-OS (Indus) combo at Walmart “group of companies” disposal in India could be a deadly lock in solidifying grip over emerging users who’re just adopting internet services. Who else compares?
Closing out—China rekkkkkkks crypto 🤯
What happened—last night, China brought the iron hammer on its financial institutions, demanding all banks, payment companies, custodians, and other service providers immediately STOP processing crypto related payments, cutting off the beer supply to the crypto party...
The consequences—the global crypto markets took a brutal shave. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Doge, all dropped below 50% of their all time highs in the matter of hours—a total bloodbath. Literally every exchange, from WazirX to Coinbase froze under the pressure of trading.
Meanwhile, folks who’ve been in this game long quickly began piling back on, gobbling any dip thrown at em, and by midnight we were back onto some respectable levels of support.
Going forward—well, this is not the first crypto-related ban China has enforced. In 2017 a similar overnight ban on all China based crypto exchanges had made the markets sweat, which had lasted much longer than this.
Big picture—far as China goes, all their attempts are most restricted at threatening retail buyers and blocking anything that’d enable disruption of the ruling party’s control over the financial system, and block moves that would undermine the Chinese attempt at a digital Yuan.
Otherwise… volatility is how we live around here my friend. Sip a neat, and HODL.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💉One for employees - Wipro will be working with hospitals and vaccine makers to collect nearly a lakh doses to vaccinate its 1.9 lakh employee base for free.
🏍️ Bring’ em back - Royal Enfield is recalling nearly 2.4 lakh bikes sold in India, Thailand, Philippines, Australia for a defect found in their ignition oil. Doesn’t help already tanking sales.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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