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Market summary: 📊
India resumed its upward journey on Monday, led by strength in mega caps as well as large IT stocks. US markets were closed for Labor Day.
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.31%
Sensex - up 0.29%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Times of Solana — time to reconsider your loyalty towards Bitcoin and Ethereum. Solana has been the talk of the town for the past month, blasting a nearly 300% growth in SOL token prices in the last 30 days alone, now overtaking Dogecoin to become the 7th largest crypto by market cap. Kinda like a light-weight Ethereum, Solana has the same essential programmable components, but is suited for simpler applications, which helps deliver much faster transaction processing speeds (50,000+ transactions a second, vs. ~30 for Ethereum), which is one of the reasons it has been at the forefront of the current NFT boom. Here’s the whitepaper if you’re nerding out this week.
✅ Party spoiler — TCS is bringing all 500,000 of its employees back to the office by the end of the years says its CEO, becoming one of the firsts to end the pajama-and-zoom party. One large organization pulling the plug should push the others to drive a similar agenda in the name of productivity.
B2B startups hit a wall 🧐
What happened — B2B ecommerce marketplace Udaan, which basically helps shop owners and retailers procure goods in wholesale, is locking horns with Parle, Amul, and few other FMCG brands, because the brands decided to stop working with the startup.
Some context — all started when last week Udaan filed an antitrust lawsuit against Parle, because Parle abruptly decided to not supply one of its most loved products, the Parle-G biscuits, to Udaan anymore (we’d probably do the same lol).
But Parle says its distributors are crying that Udaan is undercutting them at the retail point, so it had to act. Parle took that up in Udaan, and clearly talks didn’t go well, which led to an official complaint.
So… a pissed Parle, in retaliation, decided to cut off ALL its products including Parle-G from Udaan’s catalog of distribution. Amul, and some other brands followed suit.
Not an isolated case — a couple weeks ago, JioMart and HUL’s romance was similarly blocked by HUL’s 3,500+ distribution network, who alleged that Jio-bois were trying to undercut distributors at retail points, and hence HUL better get rid of them, or be ready for backlash. HUL caved.
Bottomline — Indian FMCGs rely heavily on distributors’ infrastructure to store products, balance lead times, all of which is extremely important for them to defend market share. No way they would sour their relationships because of some “digital” benefits of B2B marketplace.
Big picture — not entirely unimaginable that even regulators move to bring strict rules and guidelines to protect the middleman running India’s $850B+ retail industry.
aight, rant over.
Quick look at an old-school oil deal 🛢️
What happened — two of India’s top energy companies, Petronet and ONGC, are looking to acquire a ~10% stake in one of Russia’s largest petroleum gas projects called Arctic LNG 2.
Arctic LNG, $11 billion project, and was struggling to get loans from European governments and banks who aren’t exactly happy about Russia’s moves in the protected north polar region. India saw an opportunity to put some money on the table, secure some of the LPG for itself, which it can then sell to other South Asian countries as well, strengthening its regional energy position.
Why care — the investment is part of India’s agenda to to move away from a coal fired economy to cleaner energy sources, which includes powering at least 15% of our energy needs via gas by 2030.
Hottest from Ventureland 🔥
DIY-online store player Dukaan closed a $11 million Pre-Series A round from 640 Oxford Ventures, angels including Ritesh Aggarwal, and a few others.
Dukaan is trying to be a much less-complex version of Shopify of India — offering the most simplistic digital storefront for small merchants that's also resilient enough to scale rapidly. The category itself has been on fire post-COVID, and Dukaan has managed to scoop up over a million merchants, processing ~$125M+ in volumes over the last 12 months.
Meanwhile, Delhivery raised a quick-one, ☝️
Logistics platform Delhivery raised $76.4 million for its Series I from Lee Fixel’s Addition. Couple months ago the company had brought FedEx onboard, and since then has been cleaning up its deck and tightening ropes for a looming IPO. This round was hopefully to help strengthen the balance sheet.
Closing out — Omar Little’s gone 😞
Actor Michael K Williams who played the iconic role of Omar Little in ‘The Wire’ died a few hours ago, of a possible drug overdose. Williams was 54.
Folks, otherwise another sleepy news day - given a festive week in India and extended weekend in the US. See y'all tomorrow.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🥻 Ethinc wear FTW - Reliance Retail is launching a women focused ethnic wear brand, entering a Tata and Aditya Birla dominated category.
🐉 Ruling the weekend - Shang-Chi by Marvel made more than $71 million over the weekend, clocking the second-highest opening for any film during the pandemic, marking the return of mega theatrical releases.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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Is not B2B ecommerce killing the interest of loyal distributors and eating up the profit? For so many they have worked so hard from scratch to establish the product in the market, the Companies must look at the interest of their loyal distributors also.