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What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Winners keep winning—HDFC bank, Dalal street’s favorite holding, absolutely crushed its quarterly numbers. Profits up 42% YoY, interest income up 14%, assets under management up 10%, loan volumes up 60%—all amidst horrible operating conditions in the real estate sector, which makes the print all the more impressive. Three cheers for management, but given the second wave, the business is far from being clear of dark clouds.
✅ Not adding jobs—US economy isn’t adding jobs and the world is worried. Last month, only 266K new jobs were added against a million that was projected. Numbers had slowed down for March too, which is forcing economists to point fingers at migration away from cities dislocating families, millennial mothers forced to quit work for childcare, and LOTS of easy stimulus making cash easy to come by, taking the incentive to work off the table. Or maybe just too many crypto millionaires.
Rescue operation on delivery street 💰
Zomato is investing $100 million into online grocery Grofers, punching for round 2 after having failed to acquire the whole business last year. Valuation is rumored to be north of a billion.
Grofers is apparently also dropping its pompous Softbank-led US SPAC plans, opting to wing it without the scrutiny of the public markets for some more time.
Not surprising—we’re guessing the sudden surge in cases, and the added operational hurdles, may have dried up Grofers’ coffers. At the same time, courting public investors in a macro environment where cases keep rising, and there’s little visibility into when normalcy will return, is obviously not ideal. But then, gotta get the cash for survival from whoever is willing.
In any case, Zomato tried its hands at the online grocery business and booked an embarrassing exit towards the end of last year, and this deal offers it an exciting second chase at diversifying into a high-growth category, that’s quite a natural extension of their services.
Bottomline: grocery delivery is a brutal space, demanding deep pockets, and Grofers couldn’t have found a better strategic partner with operational expertise to ease things out at scale. Meanwhile, the deal could be viewed positively by analysts as the Zomato IPO moves along.
SaaS and fintech are cozying up 🤝
zooming into a quick SaaS deal.
Bill.com, a back-office software vendor selling mostly to SMEs, acquired Divvy, a business credit and spend management software vendor, for $2.5 billion in a splashy cloud deal last week.
Bill is quite a force in the “digitization” of the notoriously file-and-cabinet small business industry—the company’s software manages payment collection, basic accounting, reconciliation, digitizing paper receipts and a host of other boring back end functions.
Divvy meanwhile offers a sleek SaaS platform to manage spending (HR, Marketing, Travel, and other enterprise functions) combined with a host of embedded fintech products pitched at startups, including credit cards, lending products, etc.
With Divvy in the pocket, Bill is basically hoping to bring those cool fintech services that the hoodies in Silicon Valley take for granted, to the suits on mainstreet who’re still submitting paper receipts for those mid-week sales lunches.
Bottomline: financial products including payments, basic banking, credit cards, investing accounts are increasingly believed to find their way into routine software, as SaaS companies try to use the stickiness of “fintech” as a hook to upsell services, and expand profit pools.
Meanwhile, Cybercrime nonsense gotta stop 🙁
A ransomware attack has forced the largest gasoline pipeline system in the US, Colonial Pipelines, to shutter operations, throwing the US’ energy distribution plans into chaos.
Colonial accounts for 45% of fuel and gasoline supply to the East Coast of the US, transporting over 100 million barrels each day, and the attack is threatening to shut off provisions that could affect routine lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Early reports indicate that hacker organization DarkSide is behind the attack, which has been quite notoriously pissing off large corporations with major data leaks in the recent past.
What matters: the catastrophe is another data point in a series of targeted attacks affecting key government resources, establishments, and projects across the globe—all accelerated by the rapid digitization of the world in 2020 which exponentially grew loose ends.
Closing out—Elon tried 🤷♀️
Elon Musk appeared on SNL, and the plan was for the Doge-father to pump crypto and $DOGE so freaking hard that, by the end of the show all hodlers reach the promised land.
That was not quite how it went—by curtain fall, prices had tanked 15%, with no bottom in sight, and next you know hodlers have been numbed into sleep by 45% pullbacks.
Elon’s skit was was quite a spectacle though. To watch the world’s richest man call the “US Dollar” imaginary, putting on display the full force of “online-earned” direct distribution...
Skeptics call it foolery, questioning the legitimacy of a currency that’s literally tied into the mood swings of a single individual. Doge loyalists ask when was anything serious promised anyway?
Our take? Grab a beer and enjoy the real-time meme-fication of the world.
Here’s a YT link to the monologue.
Otherwise a quiet day, take it easy… see y'all soon.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🍎 My enemy’s enemy- after Apple launched its AirTag product, Amazon has now entered a partnership with AirTag’s competitor Tile, making Tile connected devices accessible via Alexa commands. Deeper partnership around smart homes is on the cards too.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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