Facebook is now Meta 💅
IRCTC teaches investing, Venture deals, and the smokers are bacc.
Market summary: 📊
Painful day in India with major indices pulling back hard in one of the sharpest crashes in 6 months. US had another strong day on the back of resilient tech earnings.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.98%
Nasdaq - up 1.15%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.94%
Sensex - down 1.89%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Good reception so far — Nykaa opened to a great start, receiving 1.5 times more bids by the end of Day 1, with the retail portion of the IPO filling up 3.5 times. Still got 2 more days for the stats to pile up. In all, the company will pull in a ₹5,300 crore pot, gushing through the gates at a ₹55,000 crore+ valuation, trading at more than 400x its earnings. Growth flywheel gotta deliver big in the coming years.
✅ DeFi is a JOKE — Cream Finance, a crypto backed DeFi platform, which basically takes your money and “algorithmically” loans it out to others paying you a hefty interest rate for the risk you assumed… well, got creamed. $130M in money was stolen by a hack, and turns out Cream has seen 2 similar hacks in the past, each time losing $30-something million. Bruh!
Facebook has a new name 👀
From Facemash to Facebook to a trillion dollars market cap later, now Meta. The Internet's most notorious empire will be restructured under a new holding company.
Zuck is making his intentions apparent, conquering the metaverse for its next challenge — a symbiotic world that merges the virtual and the real, allowing people to cultivate multiple personas, make money in the virtual world, own things, work, and connect.
Check of realism — we’re likely at least a decade away from seeing the metaverse even in its infant stages, considering the app-development and internet-latency + speeds necessary for interruption free streaming. And Apple, Snapchat, Roblox, and even Microsoft (with its Hololens) are conjuring up their own idea of the metaverse. So competition is tough.
But FB has a base that can't be underestimated — 3 billion people on Blue, Insta, Whatsapp, Oculus. Count the number of times you opened one of their apps today?
Anyway, the name launch caused a meme-fest on Twitter… Matt won handsdown!
Big picture — name change is a good start but if nobody other than your 58-yo unkill opens the FB app anymore, does it even matter?
Railway Ministry steals IRCTC’s lunch 🍗
First things first — rail-booking platform IRCTC’s stock split into 5 shares yesterday. In simple words, people holding 1 share of IRCTC for about ~₹5,000 each, will now get 5 shares each of about ~₹1,000, which in total add up to the same value. No freebies.
But then came the freeloaders — reports suggest the Ministry of Railways is apparently asking IRCTC to split 50% of its booking commissions with itself, a move that could destroy the corporation's business model.
IRCTC makes money through a bunch of ways, including Rail Neer (bottled water), Catering, Travel packages, but the margins on the ticketing business are the heftiest, and GOI’s move could eat up 50% of its profits.
We’re guessing a budget-strapped Railways (covid and all that) looked at a bunch of options and decided playing gangster with the booking guys was the only way to pay bills.
Big picture — on one hand GOI is pushing for privatization, on the other it messes with free markets. Good luck with that LIC IPO.
Quick look at who raised Monies 🦄
Digital-insurance platform Acko is India’s 34th unicorn of the year — after raising $255 million from General Atlantic, and others, at a $1.1 billion valuation.
Acko sells insurance products across categories including health, motor, travel, corporate, gadgets, working with distribution partners like Amazon, MakeMyTrip and Ola, to reach 70M+ customers, adding up to $175 million+ in premiums. COVID’s scare certainly acted as a tailwind.
Majority of the funds raised will be utilized to double down on the company’s healthcare vertical, hiring, and improving product stack.
While we’re here on raises, ☝️
Polygon-Matic, the homegrown crypto project, invested in NFT Marketplace, Colexion, giving it a $50 million valuation. Deal value wasn’t known, but Colexion is scheduled for a public launch next week — and focuses on listing only verified, celebrity endorsed NFTs, including tokenized art of specific artists and cricketers.
Closing out — pandemic stress brings smoking bacc 🚬
US regulators say 8 million more cigarettes were sold in the country during the course of the pandemic, all adding up to a tiny 0.4% growth — but a material change in direction for the first time in almost 20 years!
Stress yes, but brands like Marlboro say extra disposable income played a role too, as folks didn’t need to spend on food-at-work, travel, etc.
India may not be too far behind… 🤷
ITC grew its cigarette volumes by more than 10% for the most recent quarter, which helped the meme-stock bring out a banger 12% revenue-growth quarter. It’s money boo!
FWIW, the non-ciggy empire grew well too, with Hotels, and Packaging showing sharpest growth.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🍔 Big blue they said - the year is 2021, IBM is buying out technology from McDonald’s. For real.
🤦🏻♂️ Employee crunch - IT giant Cognizant reported a 33% attrition rate in the September quarter, the highest in the industry. Startup fever much?
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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