Buffett delivers 📈
Media deals, IPO galore, and Bytedance goes HK.
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What’s brewing hot?☕
✅ Golden boy — the only thing ruling headlines, and as it should be, is Neeraj Chopra’s god-like javelin throw in Tokyo that got India a gold — the first medal in athletics in 100+ years. India ended the tally with 7 medals, marking its best ever performance in Olympics to date, which hopefully helps make an even stronger case for better sports infrastructure.
Aight another weak Sunday, and it’s August, with folks in the west OOO trying to enjoy as many left-over summer days as possible. Let’s run through quick! 👇
Uncle Buffett never misses 🎯
Value nerds were busy sifting through Berkshire Hathaway’s 2nd quarter numbers over the weekend — overall, a good show bolstered by broad strength in economic recovery.
Total earnings for the empire grew to $28 billion, up 6% YoY, while earnings from businesses that Berkshire directly runs itself, grew a much stronger 28% YoY to $6.7 billion.
FYI, $BRK either invests into a diverse set of unlisted and listed businesses (like Apple, GM, Visa, Verizon, NuBank), or itself operates a mix of uncorrelated enterprises.
Also, BRK is heavy loaded in these old-school sectors, such as energy/utilities, railroads, chemicals — and the economic machine getting back on track is helping put up these growth figures. 👏
Quick look at a content deal 🤝
What happened — Reese Witherspoon sold her production business to a little known media company, backed by PE giant Blackstone, for a whopping $900 million!
Reese’s biz, Hello Sunshine, is best known for casual viewing staples like Big Little Lies (Hulu) and The Morning Show (on Apple TV).
Meanwhile, the media company buying them, run by ex-Disney execs, is trying to build a content house (kinda like an online Disney) that owns broad portfolio of content, gains some leverage, then negotiates better deals with increasingly competing streaming platforms. Blackstone has seeded the project with $2 billion!
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It’s a freakin’ tsunami out here 🔥
Ain’t no better time to go public, and Indian firms are making the best use of the froth. 4 major bids hit the mills this week 👇
CarTrade — applications open on Monday. The company runs a used car marketplace, as well as several online car and bike portals, and a used-car exchange for dealers to check inventory and procure vehicles. Revenues topped ₹250 crores last year, with growth softening up a bit, but CT claims it's the only “profitable” used car marketplace right now, so that’s that.
Nuvoco Vistas — cement and construction materials player owned by the Nirma Group, that runs the 5th largest cement operation in India, and made ₹7,500 crores last year. Profitability is still weak, but success hinges on the thesis that an emerging market like India, consumption of construction supplies and real estate’s success will stay healthy in the long run.
Aptus Value Housing Finance — one of the largest home financiers in South India, that primarily works with retail buyers. Aptus will try to raise over ₹2,800 crores from the markets. Again, fortunes are tied in with the real estate market, which depends on economic recovery.
Lastly, Chemplast Sanmar — a specialty chemicals maker making PVC resin, supplying stuff to petrochemical, pharma, and agro-chem industries — will open bids on Tuesday. The company will try to raise ₹3,800 crores from the markets, and is backed by Billionaire-investor Prem Watsa.
Pick yo horses!
Closing out — can we do Hong Kong? 💪
What’s poppin’ — FT says TikTok owner Bytedance, after getting blocked from its Wall Street IPO by Chinese regulators over data security concerns, may take its listing to HongKong.
Chinese firms are low on credibility among western investors right now, with the Didi bid blowing up right in the market’s face. And with Beijing increasingly becoming unpredictably hostile, HongKong seems like a fair neutral ground.
Bottomline — with $1.5 trillion in market value wiped off from Chinese tech lately, this is the worst back-drop one could imagine for the $400B company to go public.
And with tens of billions are on the hook for Sequoia, General Atlantic, Softbank among others, investors are getting increasingly nervous.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💉 Bring the jab - GOI has approved J&J’s single dose COVID vaccine for emergency use amidst delta variant concerns.
📈 Finally up - US added almost a million jobs in July, as unemployment drops down to 5.4%. Great for consumption and market confidence!
See ya’ll tomorrow with some more!👋
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