Ethnic love affair ❤️
Meme slaughter, Venture deals, and Earnings problems.
Market summary: 📊
Indian markets withdrew a tiny bit to digest Monday’s big rally. US continued to climb upward as earnings rolling in offer positive read.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.74%
Nasdaq - up 0.72%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.32%
Sensex - down 0.08%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Meme slaughter — IRCTC, which has a reputation for only going up, turned around yesterday and couldn’t find a floor lol… at one point dropping 22%, eventually settling the day down 15%. Meanwhile, ITC’s painstaking, hard-earned rally was snatched away in a blink after rumors broke that the government is considering a comprehensive policy to slap heavier taxes on tobacco products. Some real world lessons for the stonk-gang.
✅ Ola losing good blood — executive churn at Ola is raising some eyebrows. The company’s COO and CFO have both run for the door before the upcoming IPO, leaving the C-suite hollow. Moneycontrol says this isn’t new and several key employees have departed in the last 12 months, including chief business officer, and the CEO of Ola financial services. Churn is part of the deal for high-performing ventures, and Ola has been through a whirlwind of a year, but potential IPO-buyers will be asking some hard questions.
RIL ain’t done with ethnic wear 🥻
What happened — barely a day after picking up a 40% stake in Manish Malhotra’s MM label, Reliance Retail made another move in ethnic wear — acquiring a controlling 52% stake in fashion designer Ritu Kumar’s luxury label, Ritika Pvt Ltd.
Like MM, Ritika has been a long staple of the luxury custom designwear game — owning four fashion labels, across everyday ethnic-wear, bridal, and contemporary wear, sold through 150+ retail touchpoints nationwide.
The playbook for Reliance remains the same — acquire the best “design” talent, and supplement it with Reliance’s unparalleled operational and distribution expertise, accelerate growth, boost profits, and put a dent in the widely fragmented ₹1.5 lakh crore ethnic wear market in India. Stay long fellas!
Dravid, Kapil, Neeraj deliver big for CRED 💰
The credit-super app wrapped up another mammoth round, pulling in $250 million for its Series E, led by Tiger Global and Falcon Edge — doubling valuation to $4 billion.
CRED has been killing it since forever — right from its FOMO-led invite only model in the early days, to these well placed, witty ad campaigns lately— all of which helped scale to 7.5m users in no time. Along the way, producing credit and financial data troves that the best of banks can only dream of!
Fresh funds will be used to pursue investments, and hopefully pursue monetization.
Worth mentioning — fintech startups have raised $4.6 billion in the first nine months of this year, almost 4x more than last year!
And while we’re talking about fintech ☝️
Banking-as-a-service platform M2P fintech, which basically builds APIs for startups and other fintechs to build on top of traditional banking infra, is looking to raise a new round at a $600 million+ valuation, from NY based Insight Partners.
M2P was earlier called Yap, and had raised $35 million+ from Tiger Global. Its platform processes over $10 billion in annual payments.
HUL delivers, but falls short of expectations 💪
Consumer goods giant HUL, which sells literally everything from Surf Excel to Lux to Bru coffee, grew its volumes by a paltry 4% YoY for the last 3 months, vs. the 5-8% growth that investors were expecting, which took the air out of its earnings show yesterday!
Quick look at the numbers:
Revenue of ₹12.7K crores, up 11% YoY
Net Profit of ₹2.2K crores, up 9% YoY
Higher input costs continue to hurt margins — down to to 24.7% from over 25% a year ago
With the festive season fast approaching, the volume miss raised a few questions, fueling concerns that rising inflation is hurting the average consumer. HUL stock fell 4% in trading.
Big picture — signs of higher inflation weighing on consumer spending could give some jitters to FMCG and the entire consumer goods sector.
Meanwhile, Nestle had a slightly better day 👍
Nestle, the maker of Maggie meanwhile, saved the day for the sector. The company’s revenue and profit growth matched market’s expectations — with good momentum in the ecommerce business. Profits jumped 5% YoY to ₹617 crore, while Sales grew almost 10%. Markets weren’t too enthused, but at least not as bad as HUL.
Closing out — coming up fresh 😎
Zuck wants to double down on the Metaverse, and carrying all the bad PR baggage into the future may not be worth it… but didn’t see that coming!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
📹 New Product - Airtel, keen on supplementing its revenue with more tech products, launched a cloud-based video streaming platform, kinda like the AWS but for video.
🚨 IPO Alert - SEBI approved the $7 billion IPO of insurance marketplace Policybazaar.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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