Change afoot
Media is hot, Apple's hypocrisy and, RIL tests new waters.
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Market summary: 📊
Indian markets took a quick breather, but the outlook continues to be gloomy as cases show no signs of slowing down. US continued to circle in place for another day.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.92%
Nasdaq 100 - down 1.24%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.77%
Sensex - up 0.79%
What’s Friday’s brew? ☕
✅ Billion with a B—Netflix is planning on spending a monstrous $17 billion on making it self-produced movies and series for the year of 2021. This outsized spending has formed the core of Netflix’s growth strategy, allowing rapid experimentation, and letting the company keep huge $$ for its own pockets—a flexibility other streamers lack. But… as subscriber growth kinda slows, and looking at the weak and sometimes outright silly content slate they’ve been coming up with lately, it's kinda becoming hard for investors to keep cheering on...
✅ Ola fighting solid—total EV dominance, nothing else would do! Ola pushed its teeth deeper into the EV infra game by disclosing plans for an ambitious HyperCharging Network that’ll have the company set up 100,000 charging stations across India, while actively working to cobble up $2 billion in fresh capital from partners for more EV related investments. FYI, Ola is already busy building the world's largest EV plant for 2 wheelers outside of BLR, which is capable of churning out nearly 10 millions bikes a month! Do we have a winner here already?
Sponsored
Tap that yield…
Instadapp is a smart crypto wallet and API service that allows developers to seamlessly move their crypto holdings across protocols to earn maximum interest on their assets.
One of their most disruptive features is the Debt Bridge which allows users to easily migrate debts across protocols, specifically between Maker Vaults and Compound Finance.
Instadapp aims to be the default single-window to multiple DeFi services, offering a service well optimized for heavy-developers as well as everyday users, and recently raised a promising round from Silicon Valley biggies including Naval Ravikant and Balaji Srinivasan.
Crypto picks big money to expand 💰
and the tiger just won’t rest.
Tiger Global led a $25 million Series B round in homegrown crypto platform CoinSwitch Kuber, at a promising $500 million valuation. This’d be Tiger’s first money ever in an Indian crypto player, and well… no one’s surprised.
CoinSwitch, which is kinda like an exchange aggregator, launched the Kuber platform for India barely 10 months ago, and since then has scaled to 4.5 million or so users as the crypto mania takes control of the world. User base is expanding at alarming rates, and the platform has so far processed over $5 billion in transactions.
New money will be used to boost tech and security capabilities, with eyes set on a 10 million user-base goal post by year end.
and perhaps, Coinbase’s aggressive entry in India may have just lit this space up real good…
Meanwhile, old banks pick big money to stop exploding: 🤷♀️
Credit Suisse is out on the street asking for another $2 billion from investors to help itself insulate from the shameful implosion of Archegos Capital.
The bank is being pretty coy around disclosing all the details, but rumors suggest that Credit Suisse’s exposure at one point stood at a staggering $20 billion. Large part of the stale pot has been liquidated since then, but CS hopes to take another damning loss of $654 million during the next quarter, in addition to a pretty brutal hit last Q.
In all, that’ll put Credit Suisse’s net damages from 1 client, Bill Hwuang, to a whopping $5.5 billion.
The CRO has been fired, the CEO would likely find it hard to get another job, and not a soul would touch the bank’s stock which is down nearly 32% since the debacle began.
and we say crypto is where the risk is… smh.
Hold your horses pal ✋
UK’s got a message for NVDA—hold your love for ARM.
The country’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports asked NVDA to halt its $40 billion deal for low-cost CPU design company ARM, on grounds of concerns of national security.
Some handholding—graphic cards maker Nvidia made a run for low-cost CPU designer ARM Holdings for $40 billion, in one of the largest deals ever in the semiconductor industry.
Nvidia was basically betting that with ARM in its pocket, it can quickly spin up its own line of CPUs, and nail an already struggling Intel in its grave, by rolling out end to end AI-friendly “processing” platforms that use ARM CPUs and NVDA’s best in class GPU-accelerators. For the nerds, we had written about it at length before.
Anyway, the deal would make Nvidia super powerful, and the UK is kinda worried that a single company controlling too much power, especially as key world nations are getting ready to fight a cold tech war, well.. may not be ideal.
What’s ahead—long as the review is pending, it doesn't look too good for Nvidia stock, which was already down 3% on the news.
Media deals don’t happen everyday... 🤝
Jeff Bezos, Drake, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, NBA star Klay Thompson all joined hands to invest in disruptive sports media company Overtime, putting in a total of $80 million in the business's Series C round.
The raise values the business at over $250 million.
Founded about 5 years ago, Overtime basically makes snippets of sports content, including videos, pods, interviews, the whole menu, solely for YouTube, Insta and Snap, having amassed over 50 million followers across platforms, churning out 1.5 billion or so monthly views!
Ads and merch is the bread and butter of the business, which has won support from star players and icons alike for being a voice of change against the control of legacy media
Why care: its common wisdom in VC circles that content-driven media companies don’t scale beyond a certain point, a.k.a not great investments. But as consumer tech somewhat becomes commodity, communities and distinct voices are starting to matter more… and if Jeff B thinks it's wise to put a check in here, you’ve gotta smell the shift bruh!
Closing out—first we shoot you, then we loot you😎
Apple’s one heck of a company!
Right now, the business is actively cage-fighting Facebook and several other companies that rely on digital ads to pay their bills, because Apple’s iOS 14 update will make it hard for advertisers to collect data on iPhone users, effectively rendering ad targeting algos toothless.
Apple’s claim? Don’t milk users data for petty ad dollars. Fair enough.
But then reports emerge that Apple is looking to double down on its own advertising business—particularly within its App Store. Apple will basically sell more ad slots in its "suggested" apps section, where search-based algos work to target apps at users, for which developers pay-up to get you to download stuff. And that’s just the start with more to follow...
Silicon Valley giants aren’t strangers to hypocrisy, but this is some next level stuff. Meanwhile, Facebook’s legal team is having a couple extra beers this weekend celebrating all the free firepower they got...
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🤝 Reliance testing new waters - Reliance Jio and Intel have joined hands for the former’s looming low cost smartphone launch. Intel is likely going to lend help in making low cost chips, and also some R&D support.
😷 Tops keep coming - India reported 300K cases over the last 24 hours. Vaccinations are still below 2% of total population, but hopefully that changes significantly on May 1st. Hold the line tight folks, we get through this strong.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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