Elon shares his toys 🧸
Hungry Byju, more EV plans, and digital ads winning.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.
Sign up below for free. 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
Okay this time for real tho, investors returned with enthusiasm after the Eid break to take Indian markets up a notch. US had a decent session too, with tech snatching a win.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.20%
Nasdaq - up 0.66%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.23%
Sensex - up 1.22%
Weekend shot of Espresso ☕
✅ Visa bets on cross-border big time — global card network Visa, which is somewhat under attack from all sides by emerging fintech paradigms (open banking, digital wallets) purchased CurrencyCloud, a popular global API-based currency conversion and cross-border money transfer service for about $970 million — adding another heavyweight to Visa’s expanding portfolio of infrastructure first services. Cross border transactions are a dark abyss filled with old systems and fee-gorging dacoits (screw you Western Union), and a Visa could easily discount existing players, and still build a sizable “commission-first” business.
✅ Tonight’s when we pop that champagne — congos to those who got in, Zomato is expected to trade on the stock exchange today, July 23rd. You’d think all the hoopla and excess bidding might discourage investors that things have gone too far, but stock’s apparently exchanging hands in the grey market at a ~25% premium. Good rush through the gates and a couple good quarterly earnings reports could set the stage up for some feisty times for the Indian markets for the next 1-2 years.
Musk agrees to share his toys 🧸
Tesla will be opening up its charging network to allow other EV companies worldwide to charge their cars on it — a new chapter opening move for $TSLA.
Not an act of benevolence though — Tesla as of today, barely makes a dime on the cars it sells, and aggressive buildout of infrastructure and charging a commission from consumers and other car makers relying on it, is a critical piece of the long-term profitability game plan.
In the stats:
Early in the game still, but Tesla has 25K Superchargers worldwide, offering rapid charging (10 minutes for ~150kms+)
Will charge by time — or could even offer subscription packages
Game plan — this could be Tesla’s AWS moment. Competition is busy investing big money into making cars, while charging infra as a business vertical is on nobody’s mind yet. Tesla’s infra could end up becoming the rails that power broad ev-fication.
Lastly, charging stations are the ultimate fun zone for future customers to hang out — the Tesla restaurant is already a thing, but quick bites, coffees, Tesla + Starbucks? TONS of optionality!
What’s hot on Venture Street? 💰
🦄 another unicorn in the house — Blackbuck, an online trucking startup, closed a $67 million Series E round from Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia and VEF, at a $1B valuation.
Adding some transparency and structure to India’s highly-fragmented trucking industry, BlackBuck offers an Uber-like app that matches truck drivers with companies looking to move stuff around. Drivers get a quick gig and get paid, while companies get on demand fulfillment and a pool of liquid labor.
With a fleet of 1.2 million trucks, and 10K clients on the other end, biz seems pretty legit generating 15 million monthly transactions.
Meanwhile in the edtech land, 🤔
Byju’s acquisition machine gobbled another startup — a digital reading platform, called Epic, which is kinda like the Netflix for kids under 12 — with digital books, original videos, and puzzles, in a $500 million deal.
Key insight — with WhiteHatJr and now Epic, Byju’s is apparently set to make over $300M from its US operations this year. Not bad.
HUL says all is well 👏
Consumer goods companies are becoming the only hope of some good news on Dalal Street at the moment — with HUL blasting another sexy quarter, bolstering hopes of a recovery on track.
Quick look at numbers:
Net profit of ₹2K crores, up 10% YoY
Revenue of ₹12K crores, up 13% YoY
Tiny blip — margins contracted half a percent, thanks to rising raw material costs.
Overall, the operating dynamics look consistent across, as seen with Marico and others — where inflation and torn supply chains are weighing on profits, but the impact is offset by higher prices charged to the consumer.
Bad for the wallet, good for the portfolio!
Meanwhile, some color of Bajaj’s plans, 🏍️
Bajaj Auto, India’s supreme 2 wheeler maker, is setting up a new entity to run its EV business — kicking off the biz with a ₹100 crore investment, as TVS, Hero, as well as disruptors Ola, Ather rapidly make progress.
Meanwhile, the company’s earnings were a great show too — with revenues, profits doubling, despite a freeze in the auto business in June, which had seen demand crash below 50%!
Closing out — welcome the new social order 🧐
Team Blue and Team Yellow, both knock it out the park…
Your tweet feed may seem too littered with ads lately — but that’s helping Dorsey pay them bills, and most importantly, pacify shareholders and keep his job. Twitter said for the second quarter of 2021, their revenues shot up 75%+, while engagement is through the roof, with daily active users growing to over 200 million. Market rewarded the company by taking stock up 7%!
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Evan Spiegel is killing it with Snapchat as well! Revenues up more than 100%, daily active users almost topping 300 million — as GenZ users cant get off of it. Until even 2018, Snapchat was on a death march — losing cash, waiting to be crushed by Instagram, but a sudden shift in consumer behavior demanding privacy and 1:1 communications turned fortunes around. Now, a $100 billion company after tonight’s show.
What matters — both companies’ performances signal a sea-change in the way media is consumed globally, and how advertising spending is decisively chasing digital channels.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💰 What slump? - Blockchain startups raised a record $4 billion during the second quarter, 9x more than last year, despite mayhem in crypto prices.
✅ Yes you can - GOI gave struggling Vodafone Idea, the nod to raise ₹15,000 crore via the FDI route, breathing some life into the company’s stock, which was up 6%.
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! 😀