Content is king 👑
Airports going private, Leela crumbling, and TWTR's crypto move.
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Market summary: 📊
India showed decent momentum, with modest gains for 2 days in a row now. US investors gave major stocks a whopping on Tuesday, with major indexes losing nearly a percent.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.71%
Nasdaq - down 0.91%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.31%
Sensex - up 0.38%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Take em private — if Air Traffic rises by October, GOI plans on carrying through with the privatization of 6 more Airports across the country, in a bid to improve Tier 2-3 connectivity, as well as to make up for government’s revenue shortfall. List of cities includes Raipur, Varanasi, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Trichy, and Amritsar. Adani is one of the most aggressive bidders here, but apparently a few more credible names are up too, but you know who’s winning.
✅ Kurian gets more Generals — Google Cloud, under the leadership of Thomas Kurian, is getting pretty serious about India, and has beefed up its India ranks by hiring ex-Wipro COO Bhanumurthy Ballapuram as its newest Asia-Pacific Lead. All big 3 cloud giants are now turning focus on capturing emerging cloud software markets that are still underpenetrated (vs. ~20% in western markets).
Putting that Amazon dolla to work 💰
What happened — MyGlamm, one of India’s upcoming DTC cosmetics vendors, acquired BabyChakra, a new-parents focused content platform. Deal value is unknown, but we’d imagine an all-stock arrangement.
BabyChakra basically runs a bunch of communities on FB, Insta, and elsewhere, combined with an online forum that answers questions that young parents might have, along with product recommendations.
What’s next — MyGlamm wants to double down on content, and will spend ₹100 crores to build upon BabyChakra’s existing content-to-community-to-shopping experience that helps MyGlamm push its own products in emerging categories like babycare. FYI, MyGlamm had recently raised $71 million from Amazon.
Big picture — it’s inevitable that more consumer players own niche content properties going forward, as a hedge against rising customer acquisition costs, and clogging marketing channels like Insta and FB.
Meanwhile, Roblox felt some jitters 🎮
Lockdowns are over, and the gaming boom is vaporizing. Roblox, the gaming platform that’s a hit among kids saw its growth soften up a bit — falling short of market’s expectations on revenues and profits.
Quick look:
Revenues jumped 127% YoY, to $450M+, on a low compare
But the business lost $140 million
Total bookings rising 35% YoY to $665 million
Engagement wise, things looked promising though — with daily active users grew 29% to 43.2 million, and average time spent on the platform jumping 13%.
But investors weren’t buying all that, and hammered the stock down 6%.
There’s more though — the thing about category defining companies, they don’t give a damn about the stock! RBLX shrugged it off, disclosed it acquired a Discord rival called Guilded, and made bold promises on how it is building for a Metaverse future.
Quick look down Venture Street 👀
First — Zupee, a gamified quizzing platform, closed a $30 million Series B round from Silicon Valley’s WestCap Group, and others, at a $500 million.
Zupee runs a mobile app, targeting heartland India, with a bunch of paid and free quizzes that users take for a chance to win a big pot. Users have 10x’ed during COVID to 35 million, with a 15% paid base.
Big picture — trivia may be how these products get their teeth in, the opportunity to expand to adjacent services including fantasy sports, upskilling, and even EDTEK, is quite promising.
Meanwhile, at the weekly Thrasio conference... 🙄
Another ecommerce roll-up aspirant, UpScalio, raised $42.5 million from Presight Capital. The mandate is simple, find brands that grew big on platforms like Amazon, but are mismanaged or have scope for improvement, and then streamline them, while building a portfolio of multiple such intertwined brands.
Over the past 6 months alone, at least 7 companies have raised multi-million dollar rounds on this pitch in India.
Closing out — Leela is crumbling 🙁
Pandemic’s latest casualty — Leela Group of hotels. Unable to pay dues on a ₹5,000 crore debt pile, the company’s founders, the Nair Family, have been kicked off the business’ managerial roles, taking the company for the first time outside of family control.
Leela runs celebrated resorts as well as major IT parks nationwide, and had been struggling with debt problems since forever. COVID stepped on that wound, freezing revenues, and despite the company vigorously selling its properties, $$ wasn’t enough to sustain operational costs and pay lenders’ bills.
Bottomline — healthcare crisis may be leaving us, but it’ll take 3 to 5 years for the actual corporate damage and blowbacks to play out.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👩 TWTR’s crypto move - Twitter is cooking up a decentralized social platform codenamed Bluesky, and a famed crypto developer has been hired to kick off the party.
🛂SOS - India opened up online visas for Afghans as global countries scramble to accommodate refugees.
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