BollyCoin incoming 🎥

Stripe wakes up, IT delivers, and Inflation is real.

Oct 14, 2021

Market summary: 📊

Another magnificent day in India taking us to new all time highs. US had a positive day as well, despite inflation numbers surprising the markets.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.30%
Nasdaq - up 0.77%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.94%
Sensex - up 0.75%

What’s brewing hot ☕

✅ Misplaced priorities — Reliance says it made Zee and Invesco an offer to buyout Zee Entertainment’s business back in April of this year, at the behest of Invesco, but then decided to walk away sensing unresolvable differences between the CEO, the Zee-family, and shareholders. Zee founders apparently wanted to put clauses in place to raise their stake in the future, which Reliance says it supported, but Invesco wasn’t too keen on letting that happen. Not consequential to the outcome of the case, but paints the conflict as less business and more an issue of dislike and distrust between the two parties!

✅ Can’t deliver — a month into starting iPhone deliveries, semiconductor shortages are starting to bite Apple. Some key components the company orders from Texas Instruments and wireless-chip maker Broadcom are taking longer than expected, and Apple is forced to slash its forecasts by 10 million units or about 11%. 2020 was a record year for the smartphone industry, thanks to ed-tech and WFH demands, but the shortages, limited-innovation, and demand saturation is making 2021 and even 22 cold years in the making. $AAPL has mostly been flat this entire year.

Sleep on crypto at your own peril 🤷‍♀️

Crypto continues to pull in more serious folks — Stripe, the API-based payment processing platform, surprised folks by disclosing it’s setting up a dedicated crypto-team to explore potential products.

The team will be led by Stripe’s former head of engineering for Banking Products, adding at least 5 people in the near future. For now, it would take an exploratory approach, helping carve out a strategy for the entire organization — but considering Stripe processes nearly $350B+ in annual payment volumes, with reach to 2M+ end-websites, we could see real impact in a blink.

FYI, Stripe used to accept BTC as payment until a few years ago, when it dropped the currency over slow transaction settlement issues.

Meanwhile Coinbase doubled down on NFTs, ✊

Coinbase is launching an NFT marketplace — that will make it easy for folks to showcase, mint, and transact NFTs easily. Within 24 hours, 250K+ people have joined the waitlist.

Why care — Coinbase is THE most trusted platform for the average consumer in the west, and the move could bring some serious buy-in for everyday people, opening floodgates that make the “hype” we’ve seen until now kiddie play.

Worth mentioning — today, OpenSea owns about 95%+ market share when it comes to NFT transactions, churning $2.5B+ volumes each month. Other crypto exchanges have recognized this empty field and are jumping in too.

And purely from a business POV, Coinbase is hoping this move helps it diversify its revenue streams, and pacify increasingly anxious investors.

Indian IT comes out with killer numbers 👏

After a stellar show from TCS last week, IT giants continue to deliver against lofty expectations!

First, Wipro managed to grow its profits almost 18% YoY on a comparable basis. Revenues meanwhile grew 8% sequentially, and a solid 30% YoY — all signs of enterprise IT spending opening up.

Infosys also delivered big — expanding profits 6% vs. last quarter, raising its full year revenue outlook to ~17% growth (as good as it gets for companies this size), and blasting 40%+ growth in its digital services business.

The day was topped off by midcap name Mindtree, which saw similarly high-flying sales and profit growth. All stocks were seen flying during the day!

Bottomline — skeptics were betting on poor IT performance for India’s stock rally to fizzle out. Gonna have to wait longer!

Another Round Learn To Fly GIF by Foo Fighters

What’s popping in Startup Town? 💰

Online marketplace for vehicles, CarDekho, raised $250 million from LeapFrog Investments, before its upcoming IPO — valuing the business at $1.2 billion.

Despite an increasingly crowded used-car marketplace, CarDekho has managed to carve out decent room for itself — operating in 100+ cities, selling $100M+ in car volumes a year. Will be interesting how the IPO looks, esp. since rival Car-Trade’s launch was a disappointment.

Meanwhile, quick look at an acquisition,

Vernacular social platform GolBol was acquired by VerSe, the holding company that runs Dailyhunt as well as short-video platform Josh in India. GolBol reports 5M monthly active users. FYI, just 2 months ago, VerSe had raised $450M to push deeper in vernacular-social and fight against its rival ShareChat.

Closing out — Bollywood jumps into NFTs 🎥

When your barber starts giving stock tips, you know….

Bollywood had its moment of that maxim when Salman Khan announced an NFT project, joining a long list of Indian creators jumping on the bandwagon. Salman will launch his own set of collectible “artwork” on India-based NFT marketplace Bollycoin. Some serious majnu-bhai vibes here!

If you’re curious, BollyCoin, which launched with the news, hopes to secure and trade more Bollywood work as collectible on the Ethereum blockchain, and is issuing 20 million utility tokens, which will be used to exchange products, establish governance, and reward users, on its own platform. Each token is being sold for 10 cents right now. Whitepaper.

Jokes aside, smart advocates were quick to see the value though — much like the rest of the world, the average mainstream consumer in India couldn’t give a damn about the “benefits” and “promises” of NFTs or other decentralized tech — and involvement of those they admire are critical if widespread adoption will ever be a thing! Let’s see how it all plays out!

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

🖥️ INFY wants freshers — Infosys will hire 45,000 new college graduates with demand for cloud-software consulting rising.

👎 Stinks — US inflation rose to a 13 year high of 5.4% by the end of September, nearly 5x higher than regulators expectations. Stimulus checks and unlimited money-printing finally catching up!