India loves gold 😎

China actin' up, and stuff from the week before

Aug 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: 📊

India circled in place the entire week but ended the week in the green. US had a positive day too, with tech gaining some confidence from remote work and learning, as the delta variant persists.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.88%
Nasdaq - up 1.01%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.41%
Sensex - up 0.31%

What’s brewing hot?

✅ Record IPO month — ₹18,200 crores worth of capital was raised from the public markets for the month of August, the highest apparently since Nov 2017, when New India Assurance and HDFC Life Insurance had gone public. Despite all the froth, market's reaction to bids this month has been well measured, with a few like CarTrade coming out on soft ground, while others like Devyani looking great, which is actually quite relieving to see.

✅ Vaxx drives picking speed — India is kicking some ass with vaccinations, topping 1 crore shots on August 27, ending the week with 7 crore+ doses administered. More than 55% of the population has now received at least 1 shot. So far 15 crore shots have been administered in August, topping 13.45 crores in July, and 11 crores in June, a much welcome trend and pace as Delta catches on.

Weekend updates from Venture City? 💰

Alternative lending platform India Gold picked up a $12 million check as part of its Series A from PayU and Falcon’s Alpha Wave incubation.

IndiaGold is basically bringing India’s much-adored gold loans into the 21st century — allowing customers to stow their gold assets in India Gold’s lockers for a small fee, and if needed, even draw loans against the property, fully digitally.

But more broadly, India Gold hopes to leverage households’ gold assets as a variable in determining credit-worthiness and plans on helping banks apparently leverage that data. Here’s Techcrunch.

China all acting up again 🙄

What happened — this week the Chinese rolled out comprehensive guidelines on regulating algorithms that make recommendations to users, basically social or your ecommerce feeds, as regulatory caging of tech companies there continues unfettered.

What does it mean — platforms will be barred from running algorithmic logic that in any way encourages platform addiction or drives repeat consumption, especially when it comes to content surrounding national security or leading to public outcries.

Also, every tech platform will have to give users a switch to turn off any algorithm based recommendations, among other things.

Who does it apply to — Bytedance, Alibaba, Tencent (and its million apps), ride-hailer Didi are the worst affected. Worse? Spending significant time in making these policies work robs these companies of attention from competing in the market.

Aight, that’s it for today. Quick look at what went down this week…

🙌 Salesforce, healthy and well — Salesforce, the OG cloud software company, continues to grow like a weed, as old-school enterprises bomb billions on modernizing their IT post-COVID. Revenues grew 23% YoY, to $6.3 billion. Also, Salesforce’s acquisition-first growth strategy led by the purchase of Mulesoft ($6.5B, 2018), Tableau ($16B, 2019), Slack ($20B, 2020), integrating these tools into its core CRM business, has been working really well!

🙃 Goodluck Mota Bhai — JioMart’s plans of becoming a B2B vendor is facing resistance from major consumer goods distributors nationwide, who are threatening to cut off brands that sell their product on the platform. HUL, which recently agreed to a pilot via JioMart, quickly got warnings from its ~3,500 distributor network nationwide to expect blowback if it moves ahead. Things not looking as easy as the BLR-bois imagined in their ac board rooms.

🤔 Byju’s IPO—rumours are, bankers across the country are quite emphatically pitching Byju’s management to consider a listing ASAP, at valuations as high as $50B! Three cheers Morgan Stanley! Byju’s expected topline is $800M this year which translates into a Price to Sales ratio of over 50x. We’re not so sure how the markets feel about that!

🛍️ Play on Impulse purchases— TikTok is leading it’s entry into social commerce partnering with Shopify - introducing a ‘TikTok Shopping’ feature, where digital creators can pitch products through their Shopify stores. Outside of markets like China and a few Asian countries, social commerce is still under 10% of all e-commerce sales, which means there is insane potential for growth in this niche.

🛰️Another Virgin listing—Virgin Orbit, a contract satellite launch service, is planning to go public via a SPAC merger, at a $3.2B valuation. VO plays in the business of putting satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), which is witnessing remarkable growth as the space race heats up. It would be the second space company to get listed from the Virgin Group, after Virgin Galactic.

🛵 EV bandwagon looking heavy—Bharat Forge, one of India’s largest auto parts manufacturers, dived into the electric vehicles business via its subsidiary Tork Motors. 2 & 3 wheeler launches are scheduled for mid-2020, on quite an aggressive timeline, but Tork Motors has been independently building EV prototypes for quite some time now & BF could build on that progress. Also, with legacy players like Tata, Hero, Mahindra and startups like Ather and Ola, the EV space is suddenly looking quite dense.

🤖 Tesla shows big balls — nobody, in their wildest dreams, expected Musk to pull out a Humanoid. But here we are… Tesla bot, named Optimus, will help humans with repetitive & boring tasks and is *promised* to come out next year (you wish). Given Tesla has been sloggin to take a platform approach to EVs, focusing on building AI, sensing capabilities, and data troves, we’re not surprised Musk is keen on flexing the company’s mechatronics capabilities beyond vehicles.

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! 😀

Share Filter Coffee ☕