Amazon spanked 🤣
Oracle's mega acquisition, and stuff from the week before.
Market summary: 📊
Disaster of a week overall for India, with the brutal sell off continuing into another day. US finished in the red too — as interest rates continue to spook investors.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.03%
Nasdaq - down 0.39%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.53%
Sensex - down 1.54%
Weekend caffeine injection ☕
✅ Toasting China — dozens of Chinese businesses were blacklisted by the US, among which is top global drone-maker DJI, for helping the Chinese state enforce illegal surveillance of the Uighur muslims in the Xinjiang region. List includes companies that lay under-sea cables, to facial-recognition software vendors. None will be allowed to take investment, work with, or buy technology from Western counterparts and customers going ahead.
Amazon shown who’s boss in India 🥱
What happened — India’s antitrust regulators stepped in and canceled Amazon’s arrangement from 2019 with Future Coupons, which formed the basis of the Amazon vs. Reliance legal battles.
To remind ya, when Reliance proposed to acquire a debt saddled Future Retail for $3.4 billion last year, Amazon had argued it’s old arrangement with Future Coupons allows it to be the first in line to buy a stake in the Future Retail empire, if a sale ever was to happen. Hence, Reliance’s deal was illegal.
But now CCI, in its vague commentary, says Amazon may have concealed some information and “suppressed the actual scope of the old deal”, which will now be investigated, and until then, the arrangement they’ve had with Future is void. Oh, not enough? Here’s a ₹200 crore fine. 🤣
What now — Bezos will have to gather up his overpaid lawyers and decipher what this means for his legal prospects, with cases pending in several courts. But that ₹200 crore fine will be due in the meantime though. Somebody gettin’ fired for sho.
Bottomline — don’t screw with Mota Bhai.
Oracle’s weird acquisition 🙄
What happened — software giant Oracle is cooking up a deal to buy healthtech company Cerner, for about $30 billion, throwing markets a puzzle.
Cerner sells software to healthcare facilities — think hospitals, large practices, urgent care networks in the west, to manage their patient health records (EHR), and generate relevant insights. They’ve got wide distribution with some 27,000 customers, and make ~$5.5 billion in revenues.
Oracle meanwhile, primarily a database vendor, is trying to cut deeper into cloud software and is betting a push specifically into the healthcare vertical could rapidly multiply its fortunes (COVID tailwinds and all that).
But… barely a year ago, Oracle was pitching Trump on its credibility as a viable suitor for TikTok (for $50 billion+), so you can’t really blame the markets for being skeptical about such a sudden change in strategy.
Big picture — capital is cheap and M&A activity in the US is up 78% this year to $2.45 trillion.
That’s all we have for today peeps! Here’s a quick look at major stuff that went down this week…
💪 $10B support to the semiconductor industry — GOI passed a ₹76,000 crore worth Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI) for semiconductor manufacturers, moving to cut reliance on foreign imports. Some of the most potent items in this bill include provisions like up to 50% capital support to build out semiconductor fab facilities and to firms pioneering semi design and R&D.
😎 Chanel made a leadership change — luxe-label Chanel appointed Leena Nair, a British-Indian executive, as its newest global CEO. Leena cut her teeth at Unilever, spending 30+ years at the firm where she entered as a trainee and rose to several key executive leadership roles. She’d be first chief appointed by the company outside of the Wertheimer-Chanel family.
📉 Inflation hitting India — India's retail inflation number for the month of November was 4.9% — a 0.5% monthly expansion, and the third straight month of increase. Festive season demand and cash-spend, coupled with supply issues, production glitches, and labor shortages all compounding into a mess. Thankfully, GOI's fiscally conservative response to deal with COVID have helped to avoid a situation like in the western world.
🛒 Grocery races are heating up — as competition races to raise big money and gain share, Flipkart decided to secure its supply — leading a $100 million round into Ninjacart, a fresh produce supply-chain startup, valuing the business at $800M. Ninjacart buys produce (fruits and veggies) from small farmers and delivers them fresh to retailers, restaurants, and other resellers, acting as a convenient one-stop platform.
Some major acquisitions this week: 💰
Nike bought RTKFT, a virtual goods studio, for a rumored $100 million. RTKFT creates NFT's in the form of virtual sneakers, usable in the Metaverse. Weird times. 🤡
Good Glamm bought out MissMalini Entertainment for an undisclosed amount. This has been the company's 5th acquisition of the year following brands like ScoopWhoop, POPXo, and Mom & Co.
Polygon Network will spend $400 million to acquire Mir Protocol, a company that’s pioneering Zero-Knowledge tech, useful in making the Ethereum Blockchain faster and more scalable.
And then lastly, major IPO updates this week 📋
Byju's is going public in the US, via a SPAC merger. NYC-based Churchill Capital has made a $4 billion offer at a whopping $48 billion valuation.
16-year-old Reddit is going public in 2022, thanks to the meme stocks rally of 2020 turning the business’ fortunes. Revenues top $175 million, with some 50 million daily active users.
More Retail, the Amazon-backed supermarket chain in India, is planning to raise $500 million at a $5 billion valuation in an early next year IPO. 👏
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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Rule Book of Business- No Panga with MOTA Bhai.