Market summary: 📊
Keeps going up! Indian investors returned from a long weekend to take things up another notch. US had a strong pre-earnings rally too, with tech adding a percent.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.34%
Nasdaq - up 1.02%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.76%
Sensex - up 0.75%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ China arming itself up — reports broke that China built and tested out a hypersonic missile a couple months ago, leaving the developed world and neighbors stunned. Hypersonic missiles are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, can travel at 3-5 times faster than the speed of sound, but unlike traditional ballistic point and shoot missiles, can actually change their direction once launched… making them 10x more lethal and stealth. China obviously denies the “test”, saying it was a spacecraft.
✅ Startups fire up Q3 — the July to September quarter was another straight record for Indian startups — with a total of $10.9 billion raised across 347 deals, says a newly released PwC report. That’s more than 2x the $$ raised same time a year ago! Fintech, Edtech and SaaS accounted for nearly 50% of all the funding, as you’d expect, with BLR and NCR pulling in maximum dough.
Apple makes itself richer 🍎
What happened — Financial Times reports that Apple’s Advertising business has swollen 3x in the past 6 months — ever since the company introduced an ad-tracking ban, under the guise of protecting user privacy, blocking companies like Facebook from plying their trade.
Apple conveniently excluded itself from the rules, then doubled ad-space on its App Store, and since has found Apple Search ads single-handedly driving nearly 58% of all app-installs on iPhone.
What’s worse, ad-products from certain companies (like Facebook’s click-to-install for example) were rendered toothless after Apple had stopped sharing conversion data real-time with them, instead adding a 72 hour buffer. Apple’s own systems meanwhile are obviously exempt.
Anyway, with efficacy of ads increasing, brands are moving their budget to the App Store — and industry analysts are saying Apple could end up making $5B on ads this year alone, 4x’ing it to $20B in 3 years!
Stole Zuckerberg’s bread in broad daylight.
While we’re on Apple, ☝️
Yesterday was the company’s hardware product event — with a host of new devices launched. Among most notable updates are the Mac getting superior M1 chips, and the new 3rd gen AirPods, which look like old-Pros and the 1-st gen AirPods had a baby…
The M1 superchip is making some serious waves though…
L&T continues India’s IT party 👌
So far, IT earnings have pointed at a stellar quarter in the making for the entire industry — and L&T Infotech further validated that. Profits were up, revenues grew, and a healthy demand pipeline is forming.
Quick look at the numbers:
Brought in ₹3.7K crores in revenues, up more than 25% YoY, or ~9% sequentially
Profits spiked to ₹552 crores, up 21% YoY
Hiring resumed with full-force, expanding headcount by more than 31% YoY
What matters — accelerated adoption of cloud services post COVID, heightened cybersecurity risks, hybrid working, are all providing strong catalysts for the consultants to add value to global enterprises.
Closing out — invaluable Squid Games 💰
What happened — Netflix’s team is internally projecting that Squid Games generated at least $900 million in value for the company.
Netflix doesn’t “sell” a title so it's hard to tease out how much $$ the company made on a single show — but we’re guessing the number is based on how much churn it avoided, total streaming hours spent, and time NFLX “stole” from other platforms because of the show.
Regardless, for a foreign-language series to generate near billion dollars only re-iterates the distribution prowess of the Netflix platform — with unparalleled 210M+ paid subscribers.
Why care — for most part of 2021, markets have avoided NFLX stock like it's the plague — calling out its decaying sub growth, rising competition and screen fatigue. Earnings call tomorrow gotta be fun!
Otherwise, another lousy news day in the making. We’ll see you tomorrow with hopefully a lil more meat 🤙
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👋 System down - technical problems with CDSL choked brokers out for a few hours, taking down system that processes sell orders.
⌛ Still got time - GOI has given a deadline of October 29 to Airtel, Jio and Vodafone Idea to apply for delays in paying their AGR dues.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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