Broadcom wants SAS 💸

Zomato opens, Inflation sirens, and Mobikwick no good.

Jul 14, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

After a flat start to the week, Indian markets bounced back up on Tuesday. US markets took a dump after higher than expected inflation numbers gave investors chills.

US:

S&P 500 - down 0.35%
Nasdaq - down 0.02%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.76%
Sensex - up 0.76%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ Bacc with a bang — Jio added 3.5 million new users for the month of April, edging out Airtel for the second straight month. Airtel still leads the market in terms of overall share though (~35% market share), as doles drying up sap momentum for a bit there from Jio’s marketing machine. Meanwhile, Vodafone walks dead, again losing 2.1 million users this month. India’s telco market slowly sounding like a “duopoly” is a real tragedy in the making.

✅ Money printer go brrrrrrrr — US consumer inflation rose to 5.4% for June, increasing 0.9% from May — the highest monthly increase since like 2008. Everything from food, housing, fuel, transportation is costing more. Arrogant western governments that flooded their economies by printing cash are now running out of options. Wall Street took a shit today, but there’s a feeling the bloodbath ain’t done yet!

Tech M&A keeps getting weirder — as Broadcom guns for SAS 🙄

What happened — Global semiconductor giant Broadcom, best known to make WiFi chips for your high-end phones, is apparently trying to woo analytics software maker SAS Institute, for a $15-$20 billion acquisition.

Not everyday you see semiconductor companies buying out software players, that too entirely out of their realm. But Broadcom is quite unique.

Some context— the firm has grown to a $200 billion behemoth by gobbling up smaller semiconductor companies along the way — more than 50 in the past 2 decades.

But then, in 2018, it took the “software eating the world” thesis literally, and made a knee-jerking turn to acquire washed up, but cash-flow rich software companies.

Purchased CA Technologies for $20 billion in 2018
Symantec cyber security for $11 billion in 2019

And now SAS Institute.

SAS sucks — SAS by itself is facing quite the challenges too — as young modern IT teams and data analysts demand more nimble, cloud and developer friendly tools, SAS’ rigid, hard to code, and slow as a snail software has been deemed a fossil!

But Broadcom perhaps sees a steal, mostly for its wide distribution, which can be a Trojan horse for more of its products to follow.

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What’s brewing in Venture Land? 💰

No day is an off day in this part of the town…

Trell, which runs a platform that’s kinda a mix of Insta, Pinterest, and Amazon — where influencers conduct audiences while users discover products via video, raised $45 million in a Series B from Mirae Asset and H&M, at a $120 million valuation. Trell works in 8 local languages, runs a catalog of a 1M+ products, and sees 50M+ monthly active users. Quite promising!

Meanwhile, a social network for women, Pankhuri, closed a $3.2 million round from Sequoia, India Quotient and Taurus Ventures. Pankhuri serves as an online forum for women to engage, learn, upskill, and as well as shop via live streamed sessions. 250K+ users have been onboarded so far.

Key takeaway — as vanilla social networks saturate, key verticals keep falling off. The trend is only accelerating in diverse emerging markets like ours!

Them bids keep rolling in 😎

Back on Dalal Street, Mobikwick dropped its docs by SEBI’s office, for that imminent IPO — trying to get some limelight for itself.

Quick look at what we know so far:

Made ₹300 crores in revenues for 2020, down 18% YoY — thanks to COVID freezing small businesses, and holding payments volumes back
Meanwhile, losses jumped — ₹111 crores in the same year, up 12% YoY
Operates in BNPL, Wealth management, Insurance, as well as a Merchant Payment gateway biz, beyond the Mobile Wallet

At a high level, the business looks like it spread too thin — with its foot in too many things, and struggling to make headway in each. Recent hack and management’s terrible handling of it, adds more unknowns to the mix.

Closing out — History will be made 👏

Zomato’s IPO will be open for bids today — quite the historic day for India’s nascent growth tech industry, catching fire after the global financial crisis, elevated by nationwide adoption of 3G and RIL-funded 4G internet, and finally exploding on the back of COVID!

Last night’s anchor round of $500 million — which saw hundreds of institutional investors piling in (Fidelity, New World, Baillie Gifford, Government of Singapore, Canada’s Pension Fund, so on… ), indicates we’re probably looking at record demand for the bids at open. Good luck gettin’ in!

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

👨‍⚖️ You go to public, we go to Masa - Regulators approved Softbank’s $450 million investment into Swiggy, a day before Zomato going public.

⚰️Laid to rest - Jai Hari Dalmia boss of the iconic Dalmia Bharat Group passed away at the age of 76 due to COVID complications.

Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.

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