Apple got subs 🍎

Gold in fashion, and stuff from the week before.

Market summary: 📊

India dropped a tiny bit on Friday, to finish the week down overall. US markets danced all over for the week but finished Friday decisively in the green.

US:

• S&P 500 - up 2.43%

• Nasdaq  - up 3.22%

India:

• Nifty 50 - down 0.05% 

• Sensex - down 0.13%

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Weekend caffeine shot ☕

📈 Okay or not okay — thanks to record cash printing, multiple stimulus checks, and pent up consumer demand, the US economy reported its BEST growth rate since like 1984 — growing 5.7% for the year of 2021. The economy also added some 6.4 million jobs, making up for most employment lost during 2020. Progress however came at a cost — with inflation standing at 30-year highs, asset prices swollen, and purchase power of low and middle income folks squeezed.  

🥱 No Bitcoin, Only Gold — India renewed its commitment to the yellow metal in 2021, leading to a HUGE spike in the consumption of gold. World Gold Council says we acquired almost 800 tones of the metal, 79% more than we did in 2020. Of course priorities were different during COVID year, but a strong wedding season towards the end of the year saw volumes nearly double for the last quarter.

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Apple posts a RECORD quarter 🔥 

Thanks to all the holiday revenge spending, Apple managed to deliver its BEST quarter to date, chip shortages be damned — reporting $124 billion in revenues for the last 3 months of 2021! Stock jumped 7% yesterday.

Some key stats real quick: 👀

• Revenue jumped up 11% YoY, beating Wall Street’s estimates 

• Profits of $34.6 billion, grew 20% YoY

• Apple sold ~$72 billion worth of iPhones. Macs brought in $11 billion, up 25% due to the success of the pricey newly launched macs

But the most surprising stats came from Apple’s Services segment — which is now a $75 billion+ annual business, growing 24% YoY each quarter! Apple also disclosed it has 785 million subscribers paying for services on its platform. Not just a device empire no more!

Why care so much — a lot was riding on performance reports of big-tech giants as markets were starting to get choppy. So far, Apple and Microsoft have shown that fundamentals are just as strong as they were before going into the storm.

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5 unicorns for Jan 2022 🦄

What’s poppin’ — Social commerce platform DealShare picked up a $130 million check from Tiger Global, Alpha Wave Ventures and others, at a $1.5 billion valuation. 

DealShare pioneers a community buying model, letting people form groups and bulk buy everyday essentials from soap and biscuits at discounted prices. The service is popular across 70+ Tier II and III cities, reaching 3 million monthly transacting users, processing $750 million in annual volumes!

Meanwhile, Google is hedging its bets in telecom 💰

Pichai is handing out a billion dollar check to Airtel from his $10 billion India Digitization fund, in exchange for 1.28% of the telecom giant.

About $700M will go to buy the stake, while $300 million will go to fund projects Google and Airtel will outline together in the coming days. Google is basically securing tight relationships with the folks who own the “pipes” to India’s rapid digitization — as the carriers push deeper to onboard hundreds of millions of users online over the next few years!

Worth mentioning — Google is an investor in Jio too. It has handed out almost $4.5 billion of the $10 billion fund to Ambani’s empire, including backing Jio’s incoming low-cost smartphones.

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That’s all we have for today foks! Quick look at major stuff that went down this week…

👋 Meta no longer into crypto — Zuck is selling Diem, Meta’s crypto project to SilverGate bank for $200 million. Earlier called Libra, FB was banking on the project to build stable-coin infra that would power payments across the Facebook platform. But regulators wouldn’t have it, unless Facebook became a bank and got regulated like one, so eventually FB had to shut things down. Lesson, never mess with Uncle Sam.

🦄 India got a few more unicorns — HR software vendor Darwinbox closed a $72 million Series D this week to become Unicorn No.4 of 2022. The HYD based company thinks it can replace legacy giants like SAP and Workday, offering a full-stack toolkit for everything from hiring to employee management to performance monitoring and providing feedback. Revenues are expected to top $50M in 2022.

💔 Nvidia called it quits on ARM deal — unable to bear regulator pressure, Nvidia is pulling out of its $40 billion acquisition offer for low-cost CPU maker ARM, ending a 2-year long pursuit. ARM based CPUs power 95% of the the world’s smartphones — and regulators worldwide were getting nervous about having Nvidia, a $550 billion giant, owning so much control over the market. ARM’s current owner Softbank will now pursue an IPO.

🍗 Swiggy became a decacorn — the food-delivery giant raised a mammoth $700 million Series K round this week, doubling its valuation to $10.7 billion, making it more valuable than rival Zomato which is currently trading at about $9 billion. Although the growth of the food delivery business continues at a reasonable rate, it’s Swiggy’s grocery-delivery service, Instamart, that’s gotten investors all excited, reaching 2 million users, set to process $1 billion+ in volume this year!

📋 Lastly, a strong IPO pipeline forming — men's festive wear brand, Manyavar, as well as India's leading consumer electronics brand, boAt, made progress on their IPOs this week. Manyavar will be opening bids first week of Feb, while boAt just dropped off its docs for SEBI to sign off. Anyway, both run a widely recognizable, profitable operation with great fundaments. But the current market turmoil may turn a bit of a party spoiler. We’ll see.

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