Market summary: 📊
In all, a horrible week in India after valuation scare derailed the up climb. US closed a solid week, taking both the S&P and tech stocks up to all time high territory.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.19%
Nasdaq - up 0.46%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.04%
Sensex - down 1.13%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ One more time — RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das is getting a tenure extension for 3 more years, which would make him the longest-serving governor in nearly seven decades. Not a crazy call given the economic turmoil we’re stuck in post-COVID, and the consistency in policy that needs to be maintained until we’re out of rough waters.
✅ IRCTC relieved — the memes worked! GOI’s railway ministry couldn’t handle the trolling, and backtracked on its 50% commission demand from IRCTC. We’re guessing the babus got a call from higher-up reminding of how their little tactic is clouding the government's broader divestment agenda. IRCTC, which had crashed almost 25% yesterday, was quick to recover some.
Supply chain problems eat into Big-Tech fortunes 💁
What happened — Amazon and Apple, who are both usually masters of their operations, got kicked in ‘em nuts due to the ongoing shipping and production crisis.
Apple’s revenue for the past 3 months fell short of expectations. iPhones helped Apple save face though — Apple sold $39 billion worth of iPhones for the last 3 months, up 47% YoY, blasting some startup-level growth rates for a 13-year old product line!
Worth noting — revenues from India this quarter more than doubled. We see y'all Android abandoners!
Meanwhile, Amazon just lay dead 👎
Probably one of the worst quarters ever from the company, kicking off Andy Jassy’s tenure on a soft foot.
Revenues grew a basic 13% YoY. Amazon’s own ecommerce business grew just 3%. Are people sick of shopping online after COVID? Probably. But Jassy pointed at persistent labor issues (yea make people work harder for less pay, morons) and of course the shipping crisis eating into electronic product sales.
Why care — when the big-dogs miss, models get revised, valuations pulled back, and the rest of the industry starts to feel some pressha...
Who picked the dough? 💸
Crypto getting a lot of $$ — Sequoia India invested $5.7 million into Beta Finance, a homegrown decentralized finance protocol.
Beta protocol, built on Ethereum, supports lending, borrowing, and shorting against a wide array of crypto assets, much wider than the options existing popular DeFi platforms offer. Promising sure, but DeFi has struggled to gain mainstream traction, particularly due to countless recent security incidents, so that’s that...
Regardless, Beta has 10,000+ deposits within a month of its launch. Fresh capital will go to hiring and product development.
And then another fintech raise, ☝️
Drip Capital, an India and US based supply chain financing platform, raised a massive $175M round ($40M equity + rest in debt), from SF based TI Platform, Accel, and other banner VC houses.
Drip basically works with small businesses in cross border trading, checks on their volumes, orders, etc., and then issues them working capital loans based on business, freeing up valuable growth capital. Quite promising!
That’s all we have for today folks! Here’s a quick look at what went down this week…
🙌 RIL delivered big — each unit in Reliance’s extensive empire did its job to deliver a solid, productive third quarter. Total revenues grew 43% YoY. Oil-to-chemicals empire showed the strongest momentum, thanks to rising oil prices. Retail footfall seemed promising. Jio added almost 24 million new users. Markets have been choppy the entire week, but once the bull rally resumes, expect the stock to get some love.
🚘 Tesla joined the trillion $$ club — one of the largest global car rental companies, Hertz, ordered a 100K Tesla cars, in the largest EV-fleet purchase ever. Despite Hertz having deep relationships with almost every other automaker, their outsized bet on Tesla shows extreme confidence in the company’s wares, software, and platform approach — and opens Tesla to the enterprise fleet market where “connected” vehicles have a lot of value to add. Tesla stock broke through $1T in market cap on the back of the news.
🔥 Thrasio became a $10B company — ecommerce roll up king, Thrasio, raised a massive-ass round of $1B at an eye-popping $10B valuation, to keep acquiring popular Amazon based brands. The company is busy building a Procter & Gamble of the modern world, and since last April, has acquired 100+ online D2C brands. Plenty of platforms playing by the same book in India too, and by the looks of it, are the only exit options for countless D2C businesses.
🐯 Tiger Global raised a mega fund — investing powerhouse Tiger Global raised a $8.8 billion mega-fund this week, it’s largest ever, to focus solely on early stage investments in China, India, and the US. In India, Tiger has so far deployed money in 38 companies, across 45+ deals. Tiger's superfast deal-making has attracted a lot of attention and criticism too, but expect a lot more of that coming.
💅 Facebook is now Meta — Zuckerberg renamed his baby Meta. The holding company will own all the products — FB blue, Insta, Whatsapp, Novi, Facebook Reality Labs, and will trade under the ticker $MVRS. The change marks a deliberate attempt to underline the company’s next conquest, the Metaverse, and separate it from the sketchy past plagued with bad press, corporate missteps, misinformation, and vile politics.
💰 Lastly, couple big money raises of the week
Acko became India's 34th unicorn of the year, after raising $255 million at a $1.1 billion valuation
Groww tripled its valuation to more than $3B after closing a $250 million Series E from Iconiq, Alkeon, Sequoia and a few others.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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