BPCL's green cleanse 🌿
Tesla kicks ass, venture deals, and Oculus is winning.
Market summary: 📊
Alright alright, kick ass Day 1 is in the books. Major indices jumped quite a bit in India, shrugging all Omicron worries. US had a bit measured response, but Tech stocks were rewarded handsomely.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.64%
Nasdaq - up 1.11%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.57%
Sensex - up 1.60%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
😎 Musk ain’t just talk — Tesla’s business performance continues to impress. For the full year of 2021, the EV pioneer managed to deliver 936K+ cars, up 87% YoY, just shy of a million — closing its best year on the books so far. In the auto world, for an upcoming disruptor, in the middle of the WORST chip crunch the world has ever seen, that’s an incredible feat. Stock added another 10% yesterday, on top of an EPIC 8x jump since the pandemic.
🥴 Apple strike three — India’s competition regulator has finally decided to look into Apple’s App Store fees — claiming there’s enough prima facie evidence that demands a deeper review of the company policies. Core of the subject is whether Apple’s 30% processing fees hurt local innovation. Critics suggest that a blanket fee structure adopted from a late, mature tech market like the US, and forced on an emerging ecosystem like India is unfair. Apple’s defense so far? “we’re just 5% of India’s smartphone market” — too tiny to hurt innovation.
BPCL looks to get a green cleanse 🍀
What’s happening — India’s oil-king Bharat Petroleum Corp is setting aside ₹25,000 crores to build a green-energy portfolio of about 10GW in capacity by 2040 — promising to become carbon neutral by then.
Nothing new here — global oil giants have all read the writing on the wall — resources are depleting, governments are getting squeamish, young folks demand accountability, while investors are embracing ideas like ESG investing. Billions are being poured to pull off similar transitions.
BPCL has already started work though — building green-energy capacity of ~45MW, which it will actively seek to scale up to 1GW in the next 3 years — spending ₹2,000 crores on acquisitions and build outs.
Grand prize — India has set up a 400GW plan for clean energy production by 2030. Ample low-hanging fruit to harvest for old energy firms.
Besides, free brownie points with GOI for making ballsy commitments.
What’s popping in Venture Town? 💰
Groyyo, an SME software vendor, raised a $4.6 million for a seed round from Alpha Wave Incubation, Sparrow Cap and others. Congos, who was in-charge of naming tho? 🤷♀️
Groyyo builds a lightweight ERP software that digitizes planning and management supporting routine business ops for small-scale industries. Some 200+ MSMEs across apparel, footwear, furniture, handicrafts are users of the service.
Worth calling out — digitization of SMEs has been a hot area post COVID. Several unicorns minted in this category in 2021.
Then a big-balls raise at the early stage, ☝️
Amar Nagaram, the ex-CEO of Myntra, is in talks to raise $30 million for a first round of funding, from Falcon Edge and Accel Partners — at a $100 million valuation for his newest venture!
Amar is building an Indian Shein — a fashion tech play pioneering a low-inventory model, manufacturing and selling fast-fashion apparel based on emerging trends. 👏
Here’s how Shein built a $10 billion+ empire literally on Instagram and TikTok if you’re curious!
Zuck still got the magic ⚡
Zuckerberg is the king of viral growth, there’s no dispute about that. But even the OG's sometimes slip. So when he shifted his planet-sized empire to a Metaverse future, folks were naturally skeptical.
But holiday stats suggest the bet may be working — Oculus, Meta’s hardware hook, has been a holiday gift favorite in the western world. For 2021, more than 8.1 million units were sold, almost 2x that of 2020.
For comparison, even Xbox sells lesser game consoles a year (~8 million). App downloads are seeing a crazy bursts, and developers on the ecosystem are reporting crazy stats of engagement.
For the last week of Christmas, Oculus was top of the charts on the App Store — beating YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, and other giants.
Why care — we’re possibly witnessing another smartphone-like moment in consumer tech with the emergence of a new hardware-computing platform (mixed reality), opening a new era of app development, and end use-cases.
But… even Blackberry was a leader in the early smartphone days, so its too early to call out a winner yet. Apple smiling in the corner.
Closing out — where them jobs at? 🤔
What happened — freaking wave after wave is eating into India’s job market. Private think-tank CMIE says December unemployment rates were a 4-month high — standing tall at 7.91%, a 0.91% expansion since the previous month.
Urban unemployment rose to 9.3%, while the rural unemployment rate reached 7.3% — both expanding ~1% for the month. Omicron isn’t helping much.
Big Picture — analysts are counting on India’s economy to post 8-9% growth for the year ending March (after a dismal 7.3% drop last year). Any shakiness in meeting that number could take a hit on short term mood.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📉 Down, what? — India's manufacturing index contracted to 55.5 in December from a ten-month high of 57.6 for the month before. Post-Diwali easing or COVID X.0?
🤘 Crypto’s own Nifty 50 — Cryptowire, a global crypto exchange, launched India's first crypto index called IC15, which will track top 15 most liquid coins.
🧐 Edtekk, wen? — even the IITs couldn’t resist EV-hype. IIT Madras is launching an EV focused Master’s degree program, hoping to train manpower for R&D needs. $5 bet, Byju’s follows by next month lol.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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