Issaaa Christmas 🎄

Zoom emails, Tata's IOT hopes, and market news.

Dec 25, 2020

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: 📊

Indian markets added some more gains to close the week on a high — giving retail portfolios a nice Christmas present. US investors returned for a half-day session for a similar round.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.35%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.46%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 1.09%
Sensex - up 1.41%

Two things from the markets ☕

1️⃣ Bector’s doubles at open—the IPO of Mrs. Bector’s which had been oversubscribed by nearly 200x during early bidding, rushed through the gates to a grand welcome on Dalal Street with stock climbing up nearly 107% by the end of the day. The company makes a range of sell-branded confectionery products and supplies major quick-service restaurants in India including Burger King, McDonalds etc. with bread, sauces and other essentials. With consumer demand booming coming out of the pandemic, investors are hoping for bright prospects.

2️⃣ 16 firms IPO’ed in 2020—a record number of firms went public in India despite traditional industries facing a catastrophic recession and economic freeze in the middle of the year. Firms that went public ended up raising ₹31,000 crores from the markets, nearly double the amount that was raised in 2019. Market leading companies coming out of the lockdowns (esp. in third quarter) with demand soaring, growth returning, and costs streamlined gave a massive boost to the economic sentiment.

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Tata makes a communications bet 💪

Tata Communications scooped up 58.1% stake in Oasis Smart Sim, a French company that pioneers eSIM technology. Deal amount is unknown.

eSIMs (or embedded sim cards) are basically programmable sim cards pre-installed inside devices that simplify changing configurations, making devices more integrable and upgradable. While the tech is widely found in cell phones, device-to-device communications, such as arrays of sensors in internet-of-things applications or fleets of connected-machines are the most promising applications of the technology.

Tata apparently plans on using the tech as part of its customer-facing IOT platform MOVE, through which they sell mass monitoring services (for industrial sensing, logistics, supply chain etc.) to enterprise clients. Also, just 2 years ago Tata had also purchased Dutch managed IOT solutions vendor Teleena to beef up their position in this game, which shows they’re pretty serious about the IOT platform opportunity.

Takeaway: global IOT device installed base is set to explode over the next 5 years, with 2 billion+ devices shipped that will need eSIM technology. Traditional communications companies seeing a greenfield opportunity to offer hardware, software, as well as infrastructure platforms will pounce on the opportunity.

Zooming into emails 🔍

Zoom is apparently looking to offer email and calendars products to its enterprise users, slowly making moves to capture the broad office-productivity opportunity with adjacent offerings. The company will start testing the products out with a select group of users early next year.

One of the biggest challenges for Zoom is sustaining its 2020 traction into the next year as more and more vaccinated employees start going back into the office. While remote work will likely still remain at elevated levels, the stickiness and utility of their product weakens inside a traditional office setting.

Management has to think shrewdly about how new offerings can help them stay relevant, while boosting margins, and keeping the growth wheel spinning. While calendar and email may not be the answer yet, it's a good start because literally every video-meeting starts with these two tools.

Bottomline—nobody is asking for yet another email app, that’s for sure. But traditional industries and enterprises, many of whom have just begun “digitizing” still widely use products like Outlook which are extremely clunky and slow. There’s plenty of low hanging fruit Zoom could go after, and if it means one doesn’t have to switch through 8 apps just to book a goddamn meeting, enough people will pay up.

Aight that’s it for today 🎄

We wish you guys a merry and a joyful Christmas. Eat all the sweets you can, spend quality time with your friends and family, and go read that book with a glass of hot chocolate. :)

Also, Christmas is a big deal in Goa and it's the best time of the year to be around here. We’ll probably go see some friends and then go crib watching. Which means there’s no newsletter coming on Saturday. But we’ll be back for you first thing Monday morning!

Until then…

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