Delhivery, delivered 👏
IPO fest, Neobanking wars, and Green pledge.
Market summary: 📊
India pulled back a little after a rather solid start to the week on Monday. US added some more, with key earnings looking good.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.37%
Nasdaq - up 0.42%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.23%
Sensex - down 0.18%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ We want more — more than $32 billion in capital came chasing for a chance at Nykaa’s IPO, oversubscribing the bid by 80x. That’s more than 2.5 times the bids put in for Zomato. Institutional investors and high-net worth buyers poured in with more enthusiasm than retail — less hyper, more substance!. And on the same note, Policybazaar’s ongoing bid got fully subscribed and over on Day 2, with still 1 more day to go. ✌️
✅ Disneyland adventure — China locked the gates on 30,000 people inside a Disneyland theme park, after one of them apparently was found to be infected with COVID. All 30,000 are now being tested before they’re allowed to leave, which could take a few days. “As fireworks exploded above, they waited for nasal swabs” - says WSJ. Can’t make this up.
Delhivery delivers its docs 📃
What happened — logistics services player, Delhivery, joins the long list of startups to file its docs with SEBI for a $1B+ IPO, at a valuation of over $6 billion.
India’s digital-commerce explosion over the past decade needed modern logistics infrastructure to function — with better monitoring, simpler pricing, more visibility, more uptime, and wider reach relative to the antiquated models of the Blue Darts, Gatis, and a million other fragmented smaller players. Delhivery’s managed warehouses, transportation, and last mile services filled that gap.
Business is growing a healthy ~30% annually, making about $514 million in revenue, still losing money (~$54 million) but fiscally under control. Here’s the DRHP for the nerds.
Big picture — if you’re bullish on ecommerce in India, but don’t think discounts and freebies are healthy, the “infrastructure guys” can be a good alternative.
Airtel’s earnings brought some smiles 🔥
Sucks to be a telco stock-investor in India, but folks counting on Airtel to check Jio’s supremacy got some relief yesterday after Airtel put up decent revenue and profit growth numbers for the last 3 months.
Quick look:
Revenue of ₹28,326 crores, up 5.4% vs. last quarter
Net Profit of ₹1,134 crores, up a massive 300% QoQ, in part due to a ₹722 crore one-time gain from spectrum sale to Jio
Added 8.1 million 4G customers, taking total count to 192.5 million
Best part, average revenue per user grew to ₹153 from ₹146. Not good for consumers’ wallets, but Jio’s deep discounting had put the entire freaking industry into a loss-spiral, and Airtel crawling out of that hole is welcome.
Fintech paying its bills — Airtel’s payment’s bank turned a profit for the first time, which is highly commendable considering the wafer thin margins and intense competition in the space. 👏
Big picture — overall, a good day, in a bad year. With Airtel’s massive debt and aging infrastructure, the battle with Jio is long from done though.
Neobanking wars, lezzzz go 💸
After Fi Money raised a round yesterday, competitor neo-bank Jupiter is loading its rifle for a snipe — prepping for a $100 million round from QED investors, Sequoia and Tiger Global, doubling valuation to $700 million.
Just 3 months back, Jupiter had raised $45 million from the world’s largest neobank, NuBank. Still in beta, Jupiter has raked in deposits of over ₹100 crore from the 150K+ users on its waitlist, who are slowly being onboarded.
Verdict — plenty of low hanging fruit for multiple players to thrive here. Good luck to all.
While, we’re talking about startups 👇
Coinbase made a rare India acquisition — buying out Agara, a SaaS startup building a voice-assistant based customer service platform.
Brands basically use Agara’s tech to address customer questions via voice on their apps. Agara has about 200 customers, and the deal values them around $40 million. If anything, this is another strong vote of confidence for the enterprise SaaS market here.
Closing out — India’s net-zero surprise 🌿
India surprised the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, by announcing commitments to become net-zero carbon emitters by 2070.
Emerging economies typically find this hard to balance, given the trade-offs that come with clean-development and economic growth, but India’s move for the past few years — including the audacious shift away from coal, and towards renewables (targeting 50% of all energy production by 2030) has been promising!
Anyway, 120 countries are on the accord, with the US and Europe to hit net-zero by 2050, and China by 2060. India is the 4th biggest emitter of CO2 behind these 3 regions, but on a per capita basis, we're much much lower.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚀 Expanding TAM — Amazon is ready to launch its first satellites to space as part of Project Kuiper by 2022, to bring satellite-internet more widely.
🔌 AWS of Chargers —Tesla will now allow other electric cars to charge their batteries at its Supercharger stations, as it looks to become a charging-infra provider.
Aight folks its Diwali time and since the markets are closed for the next 2 days we thought we’d chill some too! So no NL for a couple days, and we’ll see y’all straight on Monday, like clockwork!
Hope y’all have an awesome time with your loved ones! Happy Diwali 🪔
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀