Kids got outbid 🙁
Flipkart's medicine move, and stuff from the week before.
Market summary: 📊
Indian markets were closed yesterday for Guru Nanak Jayanti. US had a mixed day, with tech gaining a bit, but the broad market ending lower.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.14%
Nasdaq - up 0.55%
Weekend caffeine injection ☕
1️⃣ Apple still stuck on the car — there’s fresh speculation on the Apple Car. Bloomberg says Apple is targeting a launch date of 2025, and that the car will be 100% autonomous from the get go. Huge ask given how Apple has been faring relative to other projects (Waymo, Cruise, Zoox) in testing data. Apple is also apparently designing custom semiconductor chips for the platform and working with chip giants to set up a supply chain.
The kids got outbid 😓
Gotta admire the folks behind ConstitutionDAO who pooled almost $40 million to go buy the 1787-original copy of the US constitution at Sotheby’s last night!
However, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, the dude running Citadel who also happens to be the arch-rival of WallStreetBets, won the auction beating the kids out with a $43.2 million bid (Ken bid anonymously).
Here’s a quick video of the bid. Jump to 2H:33M.
Bottomline — all the attention drawn to the possibility of DAOs, and blockchain-tech more broadly, makes the effort worth it. ✌️
While we’re here, ☝️
Crypto-exchange Gemini raised $400 million from Morgan Creek Digital, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a few others — at a $7.1 billion valuation.
Gemini is run by the Winklevoss twins, the guys-Zuck screwed over 2 decades ago, to start Facebook. The platform manages more than $30 billion in crypto assets, making it the 11th largest crypto-exchange in the world.
Flipkart jumps into medicine-delivery 💊
What Happened — Flipkart bought a majority stake in local medicine delivery platform, SastaSundar — following Amazon, Reliance, and pretty much everybody else in the game into the high-margin, high-$$ e-pharma space.
SastaSundar (that’s a funny freaking name BTW) got its start about 8 years ago, but still remains a baby player — last valued a ~$100M, with a distribution network of only about 490 pharmacies. Flipkart is going to take the core and then invest in building out a studier operation, and integrate med-delivery and consultations into Flipkart’s loyalty program, Flipkart+.
Bottomline — digital pharma is barely 5% of the total pharma spending in India. Flipkart is late, but plenty cake left for everyone at the party.
Aight peeps, that’s all we have for today! Quick look at major stuff that went down this week…
💔 J&J broke — healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson is splitting into 2 separate publicly-traded entities, to get rid of a bad image after a failed COVID vaccine program, and bad press from multiple cancer-lawsuits. The core biz will still be called J&J, focusing on R&D heavy pharma products and medical devices, making about $75B in revenue. The low-margin consumer-products business, generating ~$15B in sales, will be spun out as a new entity in the next 24 months.
🍎 Apple’s greed knows no bounds — independent developers are claiming Apple is running ads in their names to drive users to its App Store, instead of their websites, so it can collect the 30% commissions on the payments users make. App-developers (even Netflix, Spotify) discourage new users from signing up on mobile-apps because Apple takes a 30%-cut of everything they make. Apple gotta satisfy shareholders, but with rising developer resistance, the bad PR this gathers… worth it?
🦄 Fastest unicorn in India — ecommerce holding company, Mensa Brands, closed a $135 million Series B round at a $1.2 billion valuation, becoming India’s 36th unicorn of the year. Mensa acquires and scales category leading digital-only brands running on platforms like Amazon, Flipkart, pooling resources to cut costs and compound growth. Countless such platforms have emerged in India this year alone.
✅ ITC infotech to be spun out — cigarette-king ITC is apparently thinking of spinning out a technology consulting business from its belly, ITC Infotech, as a separate entity. Last year the biz made about ₹2,500 crores in revenues by itself, growing 8-9% YoY. Sick of the value-trap, an increasing faction of ITC bag-holders have advocated for separating its ciggy-empire from the rest of the business. One move at a time.
👎 Paytm missed by a mile — PayTM’s stock went bust at open, ending the day down 27% for its first day as a public company. Given how the subscription looked, you could see a weak show incoming from a mile away, but nobody expected it to be the worst listing of the decade! Investors are concerned about them losing money by the boatloads, rising competition in the payments space, and as well as shrinking take rates. Good challenge for management.
💳 Amazon and Visa want to kill each other — Amazon is cutting off Visa as a provider of its co-branded credit cards over disagreement on how much fees Visa charges. Amazon says Visa’s fraud detection tech has barely changed over the last several years, yet they keep charging more and more money. Mastercard, Amex, and a few others are being courted. Visa, already struggling with the rise of BNPL, Digital Wallets, and alternate payment mechanism, could end up losing hundreds of billions in payment volumes if the spat escalates.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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