Don’t sleep on Africa 💰
NFT craze, IPO season, and Bumble goes on a date
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Market summary: 📊
Back to back positive days in India as the large swings cool off a bit. US keeps on adding lost ground, with tech particularly showing promise on the back of a few successful IPOs.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.04%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.36%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.51%
Sensex - up 0.50%
What’s hot bruh? ☕
✅ NFT GAME GONE CRAYYYY—just hear me out… a digital artist called Beeple sold his art-backed NFT for an ungodly sum of 69 freaking million dollars last night at a one of a kind auction that was held at traditional auction house of Christie’s in New York. The auction house has existed for over 250 years, selling art of legends including Leonardo Da Vinci in the past, which makes the events unfolding here all the more symbolic. Beeple basically set out on a crusade in May 2007 to create a digital painting each day for 5,000 days without missing a single day, and then collated everything in one image naming it “EVERYDAY: THE FIRST 5,000 DAYS”. What’s amusing is that until Oct 2020, our man was mostly low-key, and hadn’t sold any art for over $100 in his life!
We’re really starting to see some potential in this newsletter.
✅ Straightening out the intruders—Google Pay will be giving end users a bit more control on how their UPI transactional data is utilized. As things stand today, payment processing apps commonly leverage transaction history to market additional services to end users, including blatantly selling data to third party apps, but a couple of petitions in the Supreme Court are demanding either users be compensated or be given flexibility to limit what gets shared. Google’s gotten the message and is preemptively taking steps to avoid another catastrophe.
Don’t sleep on Africa 💰
The Stripe of Africa, Flutterwave, raised $170 million for its Series C from Avenir Growth Capital and Tiger Global, valuing the business at over a billion dollars. Post pandemic digitization is in full swing in Africa, and fintech naturally has been one of the hottest segments.
Like RazorPay and its other regional compadres, Flutterwave makes it easy for developers to embed the functionality of processing payments within a digital app via a bunch of APIs. They primarily operate in Nigeria, but have been diligently expanding through the African region, solving a critical pain point of cross border payment acceptance and currency conversion across the continent, something the region’s digital economy has struggled with in the past.
Flutterwave has to date processed over 140 million transactions, with cumulative payment volumes of over $9 billion—which isn’t bad for a 4 year old company. 300K businesses across 11 countries use the platform, and revenues apparently grew over a 100% over the past year.
Bottomline: Internet penetration in Africa stands at about 40%, well below the 65% world average. An explosion in population combined with wide digitization is going to deliver one of the most digitally fertile regional economies the world has ever seen in the next 2 decades. These businesses are going to be the $100B empires of the future.
Day in the listing ✈️
Tis’ the season of IPOs, and we’re following three major bids across the world today:
In India, the IPO of Easy Trip Planners saw overwhelming demand coming from HNIs, Retail investors, as well as institutional money with the total bid oversubscribed by nearly 160 times. The online travel and booking platform, which makes most of its money on airline bookings, had a good run before COVID, with revenues growing 45%+ consistently, solid profitability, and about 5% market share in the OTA game. Investors are counting on expanding market share as demand starts to gradually recover.
Then quickly turning eastwards, the Amazon of South Korea, Coupang, opened gates on a blockbuster listing raising $6 billion from the markets and valuing the company at over $110B. 42 year old founder Bom Kim will be worth $12 billion+. Founded in 2010, the company made about $12 billion in revenues for 2020, growing an alarming 90%+ in the year—and is one of the largest IPOs of an eastern company in the US after Alibaba.
Lastly, Roblox’s direct listing was a HUGE victory. Markets lapped up every last share they could find and more, slapping a $38 billion market cap on the company by end of day. Touted as the future of the gaming industry, the company sells a gaming engine that makes it easy for developers to build socially competitive games, with an enviably passionate fan following among the younger generation.
Overall these listings underline that despite the choppiness we’re seeing in global markets right now, the mood still remains favorable to growth businesses promising things of the future.
Interesting fact—in 2018, Softbank invested $3 billion in Coupang for about 35% ownership. At IPO, the stake is now worth $35 billion+. Masayoshi Son still got it.
Organizing for the future 🔌
With the EV era right upon us, most automakers are tuning their sails to match the direction of the wind. Mahindra and Mahindra will be setting up two native EV related verticals going forward—one leading last mile mobility, and another running EV tech center for R&D.
The last mile mobility unit will be driving sales of Mahindra’s existing portfolio of electric vehicles for commercial use cases, including supplying last mile logistics vendors with vehicles for e-commerce delivery as such, as well as pushing sales of EVs through current network of dealers in local and foreign markets.
The EV Tech centre vertical is going to run R&D operations, including controlling software development, battery research, explore M&A opportunities as well as deeper research to turn the company’s existing petrol/diesel SUVs portfolio into a full electric slate.
Why care: these micro-decisions will compound into life and death calls for India’s traditional automakers as EV infra picks paces and big money competition heats up from traditionalists, disruptive upstarts, foreign giants like Tesla, as well as fresh entrants lured into the game, from Reliance to electronic manufacturers like Foxconn.
Got some hints on the dating game for ya 🐝
After its recent high-profile IPO, Bumble had its first-ever date with investors yesterday, explaining quarterly business performance, and the numbers looked pretty solid. Revenues grew, user base expanded, and losses contracted.
Quick look:
Revenues up 31% YoY to $165.6 million
Total paying users up 32% to 2.7 million
Posted a net loss of $26.1 million in the quarter
Investors seemed pretty pleased with growth returning, and the stock was trading up 10% the next day.
Going forward: mid-2020, it had seemed like the dating market would remain dead for a long time as the pandemic eliminated the possibility of meeting your date post a match.
Fortunately however, the new times opened a million other doors. More & more people began seeking friendships and platonic relationships online, in an increasingly digitized world, as Zoom calls and scheduled meetings took away the serendipity of life.
The dating platforms are now claiming the non-dating relationship space is going to be twice as big over the next 5 years as the dating game.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🔌 Old guys chasing the future - HPCL has launched a one of its kind EV charger in collaboration with Magenta EV Systems under its start-up development program. The charger is incorporated in energy efficient street lamp columns which will encourage EV adoption at lower charging rates.
🎵 Regional is the only way forward - Spotify is now available in 12 different languages on the mobile app taking the count of total languages on the app to 62. Not only will this help give more creators the opportunity to build careers, but it will also allow the platform to engage more listeners specially across heartland India.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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