Market summary: 📊
Arrgh. India turned around sharply on Wednesday after a couple great days. US had a modestly positive day, but long way to make up for last week’s carnage.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.41%
Nasdaq - up 0.47%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.99%
Sensex - down 0.93%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Online gaming canceled — Karnataka wrecked online gaming with a new legislation, that in addition to regulating real-money gaming, bans online casinos, sports betting, and other similar apps. Startups operating within the state will be subject to additional compliance burden, and industry players are projecting a ~10-12% revenue hit for the entire industry due to lost player base.
✅ What now FB — Facebook-whistleblower finally met with regulators and accused the company of hiding research from public scrutiny. The impact of the hearing was diffused by the timing of the outage though — which reminded people of the platform’s utility, especially in developing countries where people rely on it for basic comms. Regardless, Zuck thought it was a good idea to speak out against the whole affair, in a 1,500+ worded essay, rebutting each accusation against his pet project. The meaningless theater continues!
Big Money coming for Indian crypto 🔥
Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prolific crypto investors in Silicon Valley, led a $260 million round along with Coinbase, into CoinSwitch Kuber — doubling the startup’s valuation to $1.9 billion 🦄
This’d be Andreessen’s 1st investment in India — another sweet reminder of how attractive and obvious the local market is becoming for global investors.
Besides, the crypto ecosystem has been on fire here. In the past couple months alone:
CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn, and managed to pull some heavyweights to market its wares
Crypto asset ownership spiked 600%+ over the past 12 months
And, regulators have come after exchanges for hundreds of millions of $$
Unbridled optimism meets lazy skepticism.
Regardless, CoinSwitch reports 10M users, a 2.5x jump since April — but we doubt all of those are transacting users, and could just be folks who downloaded the app seeing their favorite celeb pitch it on insta.
Quick look at a boost to India’s textile industry 💪
What happened — GOI cleared the way for 7 new mega textile parks to be set up across India — under a new scheme meant to centralize textile production in specific locations to solve problems around supply chains, labor and such.
Currently India’s textile industry and value chain is extremely fragmented across the country — with crop grown in one particular state, spinning in another, garmenting in another, all of which makes the industry sluggish, adds costs, and hurts how competitive products can be at the global level.
Deets and benefits — GOI hopes that by bringing major investments into centralized locations, production problems can be ironed out. ₹5,000 crores will be allocated over the next 5 years, and plenty of incentives are on the table for companies that decide to set shop as early as possible. Here’s Moneycontrol.
China is testing the world’s patience 🤦
Turns out, Evergrande ain’t the only real-estate company blowing up.
What happened — another property developer, Fantasia Holdings, reported to Chinese stock exchanges that it missed a payment of $315 million to lenders, further spooking people about China’s property market crisis.
Fantasia, which basically develops and sells luxury apartments, missed a $200 million payment on US bonds, and a $100 million loan repayment to a company it had taken money from — which happens to be China’s second largest developer after Evergrande lol.
FYI, Real estate sales in China's top 30 cities have already plunged 31% this year.
Markets are shit scared — real estate and allied businesses make up nearly 30% of China’s GDP. Want more? Almost 29% of all loans extended by Chinese banks went to finance real estate projects last quarter. Nobody is prepared for this!
Closing out — airlines are still sluggish ✈️
Expectations are bloated, but for the month of September, India’s air traffic grew just about 3% month-over-month, with flight capacity climbing to an average of 54% — hinting at sluggish recovery for the sector. Air passenger growth however was up about 74% YoY for the month.
Savvy investors have been closely watching the airline stocks (Indigo, Spice, Jet) for a rebound — but while COVID 2.0 was a party spoiler before, delayed recovery, and rising fuel prices are becoming a party spoiler now. Plenty riding on how holiday travel will look!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🤷♀️ Whatever works - on accusations that it rushed the acquisition offer, Zee is telling its shareholders it is open to offers from companies other than Sony too, but wants the current CEO to lead the ship. That’s non-negotiable.
💃 Twitch is hacked - Amazon owned game livestreaming platform Twitch saw a massive breach last night. Anonymous hackers posted a copy of the website’s source code, creator payment logs, and other valuable data on a forum. Gotta sting.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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