I’m sorry, Android who? 🤔

MSFT kills it, GME update, and Loon shuts down.

Jan 28, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

Another brutal day in India, with the sell off continuing unabated. The US stock market has suddenly turned into a casino for rookie traders, as seasoned investors run for the fences.

US:

S&P 500 - down 2.57%
Nasdaq 100 - down 2.80%

India:

Nifty 50 - down 1.91%
Sensex - down 1.94%

What’s hot? ♨️

✅ Some history is being made—The COO of Starbucks, Rosalind Brewer (couldn’t have had a better last name), has gotten a job offer as the CEO of Walgreens, one of the leading retail pharmacy chains in the western world ($140B company). She will be the only black woman on the list of CEOs currently leading any Fortune 500 company.

✅ Hindustan Unilever sends good signals—HUL, which owns some of India’s leading consumer brands across foods, beverages, cleaning suppliers, personal care etc., grew revenues by 21% for the December quarter. Total goods volumes grew for the second straight quarter after terrible declines during lockdowns. Investors seem pretty happy with the performance.

✅ Gamestop bois have gone rogue—the peasant rebellion out to shut down Wall Street stretched into another day, dragging the markets down. The redditors are NOT giving up. Many hedge funds who were short Gamestop have secured what’s left of their bag and ran for the hills by now. Yesterday, the stock gained another 130%, and now they’re talking about pulling a similar bout on a few more companies.

BTW—if you’re flooded, we simplified the mania yesterday.

Loon to be laid to rest with the other burned Google projects ⚰️

Google is pulling the plug on Loon, one of its moonshot projects that aimed to utilize a fleet of balloons to provide connectivity in remote regions across the world, like Africa and the Middle East.

Loon ran for 9 years, before finally taking one last flight.

If you look at Google’s history of starting and closing audacious projects, this is not a surprise. But Loon’s promise was credible. Parts of the emerging world barely have any connectivity to this day. If Google could build a constellation of these high-flying “balloon-towers”, millions could get digitized.

Only last year had Loon successfully launched 35 fleets of balloons in Kenya. Also barely a few years ago, services were also introduced in areas of Peru and Puerto Rico, affected by natural calamity.

Why did things go south? Well, it's a highly expensive, logistically exhaustive task to operate a fleet of balloons like that. Tech needs constant updating, and breaking even on investments is hard. Management quickly understood that monetizing with huge looming expenditures is not feasible.

Bottomline: Internet giants, increasingly occupied with other problems like regulation and policing for example, are basically struggling to keep up with the innovative crusades they had picked a decade ago which made sense then.

Google especially is on the clock to keep delivering shareholder value, which comes from business growth and tangible profits. No time for all these fancy side hustles!

Meanwhile, Vimeo is still alive 📹

...and doing quite well actually. Increased consumer digital time during COVID has forced more enterprises to look at online video as a credible channel to expand their market reach, and Vimeo is riding that increased demand to raise nearly $300 million in fresh funds.

Post round, valuation will be set to $6 billion.

Unlike YouTube, Vimeo offers a white-labeled video platform, with a bunch of integrations and analytics in the back, giving companies like Starbucks, Amazon, Deloitte, Zendesk, and even oldies like Siemens more control and flexibility to use videos for internal training material, employee handbooks, customer support videos, marketing and advertising content.

One the back of the WFH boom and digital engagement, the company grew nearly 57% YoY in the December quarter, now reaching 200 million+ end users across 150 countries, with 1.5 million paid subscribers. Plans of going public this year are now on the cards.

Apple doubles India market share 🍎

Mission India is a success—Apple shipped over 1.5 million iPhones in the last quarter of 2020, a phenomenal 100% YoY growth, which saw the company’s market share nearly double to over 4% by the end of the year in the premium category.

For the whole year, 3.5 million shipments of iPhones were sold, up 60% growth YoY. Here’s what helped:

Launched a digital store in India for the first time this year
Pent up savings meant consumers could splurge a bit during Diwali holidays
Lockdowns meant people spending more times on their phones, realizing it's time for a better screen and a better look, which drove a unique device upgrade cycle
Lastly, status bro—can’t argue against that in India

Despite passionate rebuttals by Android fanatics that Apple will never catch up, we’re here now. Still a long way to go, but they’re ramping up production in anticipation of continuing momentum, and especially with 5G looming on the horizon, further share gains are simply inevitable.

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Microsoft carves out some business perfection 🖥️

Thanks to artful execution by Nadella and strong secular trends in diverse business such as cloud, gaming, and consumer devices, Microsoft’s business barely skipped a beat last quarter.

The company absolutely smashed every single expectation investors had, growing revenues, accelerating profits, and guiding the markets for an even better 2021 in the works.

Quick look at some key financials:

Revenue of $43B, up 17% YoY
Azure cloud business grew 50% YoY—as enterprises continued to splurge on shifting IT infrastructure to the cloud
Gaming grew a massive 40% YoY—thanks to a record holiday quarter and locked down consumers buying consoles and new games
Linkedin grew 23% as post recession job searches go on aggressively

Investors quickly took the stock up 5%, with the company now trading at a market cap of over $1.75 trillion! Rarely do companies get such unanimous approval of the markets for their performance. As good as it gets.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

😎 Nothing up to something- Carl Pie, the founder of OnePlus, finally launched his own tech venture called 'Nothing'. The brand aims to bridge the gap between people and technology with wearable devices. No clue what that means so far, but the company has $7 million in seed funding from Casey Neistat, Tony Fadell and CRED founder Kunal Shah, so we’re hoping it's something cool.

🤝Reliance helping amp up COVID testing - RIL has entered into an agreement with Israel based Breath of Health (BOH) for the company's COVID-19 breath testing platform to conduct millions of tests every month in India. The deal is valued at $15 million, and the BOH COVID kit claims to have over 95% success rate.

🎮FAU-G finally made its debut - After GOI banned the popular game PUBG from the country along with many other apps, Bengaluru-based nCore games launched its much awaited rival FAU-G (short for Fearless and United Guards) on the occasion of Republic Day. The game is currently available for Android users only.

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