Fistfight over Zee 🙄
Tata's change, Jupiter's raise, and Apple's flop show.
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Let’s go ahead and get started:
Market summary: 📊
India showed a tiny move upward today, led by some old school shareholder activism (more below). US investors are still in a sour mood over inflation worries.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.57%
Nasdaq - down 0.33%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.14%
Sensex - up 0.12%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ We need a fighter — Tata Sons, slowly trying to move beyond the oversight of an aging Ratan Tata, is considering a historical revamp of how it is managed — looking to hire a CEO to take control of all its 100+ businesses that includes 20+ publicly traded companies. Until today, the business was “managed” by a Chairman, and individual heads for each business (like TCS, Tata Steel etc.), but a central CEO role is being carved for day-to-day operational leadership, while the Chair will be relegated into an “oversight” and shareholder governance role going ahead.
✅ Send money to Singapore — RBI joined hands with Singapore to link India’s UPI payment system directly to its Singapore’s equivalent called the PayNow, to allow expats and businesses to make low-cost, instant, cross border payments, in a unique and one of a kind project trial. Both countries exchange about $1B in remittances each year, and this project could drive tens of millions in fee savings, setting the stage for wider and more ambitious experimentation on the UPI.
Zee with some boardroom entertainment 👀
What happened — Zee entertainment’s stock shot up 40% after major shareholders moved to fire and replace Zee’s CEO Punit Goenka, and a few other directors.
So.. two major shareholders are leading the assault, Invesco Developing Markets Fund and OFI Global China Fund — who combined own 17.88% of the company. CEO and management’s handling of the business has received a lot of skepticism, including concerns over declining revenues, and lagging moves into streaming.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was a 40% increase in compensation to the CEO last year while Zee’s revenues tanked and stock is down more than 50% over the last 5 years.
So what now — during its annual general meeting yesterday, the CEO says he is hell bent on improving corporate governance. Meanwhile, the revolting shareholders demand the appointment of 6 new independent directors.
Bottomline — activist involvements are mostly THE last resort, and given the MASSIVE bump in stock prices, markets have spoken loud and clear. Hard for the CEO to hold onto his gig without being put on a leash.
Fun fact? Billionaire Rakesh JhunJhunwala poured into the stock leading to its 40% rally lol
Who made a trip to the bank 💰
Neo banking startup Jupiter, who is so far the leading horse in the challenger banking races, raised another $10 million as part of its ongoing Series B round from QED investors.
Just a month ago the company had scooped up $45 million from a clutch of big investors including the world’s largest neobank, Nubank. Jupiter is working on a full public launch, starting with rollouts to its 100K+ waitlist, and we’re guessing the funding comes on the heels of positive signs here.
FYI, QED is an investor in many well known fintechs like Klarna, Nubank and Affirm, and Jupiter is their 3rd bet in India.
While we’re here, ☝️
Pharmeasy is raising $200 million from Blackstone, BlackRock, Amansa Capital and others, at a $6 billion valuation — a 40% upside revision to its July valuation. The company also added 5 new independent directors yesterday and will hire 200 engineers for a dev center — cleaning up for the IPO. Good luck finding those engineers tho. 🤷
Mailchimp wiggled out $2 billion more 😎
We wrote about Mailchimp’s sale to Intuit a while ago, but at that time the price was $10 billion, and it turns out MC managed to negotiate an extra $2 billion afterall, shaking hands for a $12B all stock and cash deal.
Game play — Intuit sells bookkeeping, taxation, and back office admin software to small businesses in the US. Digitization and online survival are Top Priority items for all its clientele right now, and it can easily upsell Mailchimp’s marketing tools to its core base, while at the same time, push its boring back office products to the internet-savvy businesses Mailchimp currently serves.
If you’re looking for some mid-week reading, this Inc. profile on Mailchimp’s bootstrapped journey is excellent!
Closing out — what we got, Apple? 🍎
Consensus is… Apple’s device launch event was a dud. iPhone 13 couldn’t have been any more vanilla, and the product updates lacked innovation.
In any case, here’s a roundup of the major details for your Zoom small talk:
Launched iPhone 13 — Mini, Regular, Pro, Pro Max — powered by A15 bionic chip which Apple convinces you is the fastest ever. Could anyone notice though?
iPad mini and Pro power packed for the work from home crowd
Watch Series 7 was the boldest product — gets a bigger screen, but remember shipping delays due to semiconductor shortages?
and software front bring iOS 15 on Sep 20
Here’s a blog from Verge. Meh.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👋 Secure the bag - Zomato co-founder and head of supply, Gaurav Gupta quit the company after 6 years, raising some eyebrows in the public markets.
🏭 Project clean up - Tata Steel is setting up a carbon offsetting unit at its steel plant in Jamshedpur, which’ll extract upto 5 tonnes of carbon per day.
Coffee Points ☕
👋 curious how much Filter Coffee you consume? — thought we’d pack the stats in for you to have a look! Also, we’re brewing something hot!
Project Cleanup-TATA.............Hope more corporate to join race towards greener tomorrow.