How's Oyo looking? 🙌
Bezos' investment, Big tech updates, and the week ahead.
Happy Monday folks 👋
Another lazy news Sunday in the books! Let’s run through a few things real quick….
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Another homegrown vaccine — local pharma giant Zydus Cadila is working with GOI to bring its no-jab vaccine to the market by the end of the year. The 3-dose product doesn’t need a needle but uses a jet-injector to place the vaccine fluid into your body. Zydus wants to charge about ₹1,900 per dose while GOI is trying to bring the price in to a marketable range — after which mass deployment will begin.
✅ Betting on Indonesia — outside of going to space, retirement-Jeff-Bezos is busy deploying his fortune. The ecommerce king signed a sizable chunk into the $80 million round of Indonesia’s ecommerce platform Ula— which is building a B2B platform that helps small retailers and mom -and-pop stores buy goods, secure logistics services, and get basic loans. Ula was actually founded by ex-Flipkart exec Nipun Mehra barely a year and half ago.
Oyo dropped its docs 📁
After Zomato, pretty likely Oyo will be the most debated IPO of the year! The startup dropped its financials a couple nights ago, and as expected, drew mixed reactions…
Quick look at the numbers: 👀
Barely made $660 million in revenues last year, due to a brutal 70% YoY decline during COVID
Losses narrowed, but still lost $528 million (literally all of the money it made)
Works with 157K hotels, and India, Malaysia, Europe bring 90% of its revenue
Among other bright spots were 100M+ app downloads, and an extremely popular loyalty program with 10M users — which show the company’s digital prowess, unlike any other hotel chain in India.
Also, the founder bringing $700M of his own money into the last fundraise to build up his ownership to more than 30%, with no plans of selling any shares in the IPO — are all positives.
Bottomline — the company’s (mis)fortunes are directly tied into the state of the travel industry in India, and how quickly it rebounds towards the end of the year ✌️
Here are the docs if you’re looking!
Two quick updates from Big-Tech land 💻
First up, rumors are, Salesforce is trying to buy out Box.com — the enterprise cloud storage company which is struggling to find any purpose for itself in 2021, when cloud storage is featurized, and often offered as a free tag along!
The $3.5 billion Box has been under a lot of shareholder pressure to consider a sale — as growth flat-lines, product has failed to innovate beyond core offering, and stock has returned literally nada since the IPO in 2015.
Big fish eat small fish — the $270 billion Salesforce meanwhile is trying to become the new Microsoft — a trillion-dollar goliath with an inescapable web of cloud-first services. So $CRM has been on an acquisition spree to make its products sticky — buying Tableau, Mulesoft, Slack, and now Box…?
Then, moving to Google’s graveyard… ⚰️
What happened — Wall Street Journal says Google is killing its much-hyped fintech product Plex which was supposed to offer users banking services.
The product, launched with much fanfare, was supposed to club Google Pay wallet with basic bank accounts, credit cards and a bunch of other features. But several internal deadlines on development and integration with Citibank were missed, which led to the project lead departing (read fired), and ultimately the team closed.
Bottomline — compare Google’s fintech execution with that of Apple, which has been killing it with its wallet, credit card, and now BNPL.
Closing out — What lies ahead? 🤙
How TF we got into October so fast is another discussion, but that was the end of another quarter — and markets will be tearing apart for signals on where we are headed.
Few things keeping the street busy this week:
RBI’s rate change — the central bank will disclose its interest rate changes mid-week. Increase in the rates would mean borrowing money becomes harder, which could pull stocks down. The street’s expectations are aligned for rates to remain the same.
Economic data release — on Tuesday we have key data indicating growth in production and services coming from IHS market — which will show how the trend in recovery looks like.
Earnings kick off — then, starting Friday we have earnings kicking off, with TCS being the first major play to open its books.
Otherwise, gotta be an easy week, unless Evergrande explodes!
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
📈 Growing fast - Disney+ makes $1.5 billion a year just through its mobile app, as the streaming giant continues to witness success. Remarkable execution!
🙄 Still sour - with US-congress elections coming up in less than a year, Trump has approached a court to ask Twitter to restore his account back.
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! 😀