Market summary: 📊
India turned south on Thursday after 3 straight days of gains on the back of the budget. US flogged technology stocks after Zuckerberg flunked his earnings test big time!
US:
S&P 500 - down 2.44%
Nasdaq - down 4.22%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.24%
Sensex - down 1.29%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
📉 Big billions — Facebook’s catastrophic decline yesterday, following a disastrous earnings report, ended up costing the company $252 billion in market cap (24% of its value) — which would be the BIGGEST single day market cap decline in the history of the stock market! The company single handedly pulled the Nasdaq down by like 2%, and Zuck lost close to $30 billion in personal net worth. The stress!
💰 Nobody asked for one — one of the biggest problems with blockchains is that anyone can launch one. This time, its the founder of WazirX, who’s launching his own chain to apparently solve scalability issues and high-transaction costs associated with existing solutions like Ethereum and Solana. The new chain will be called Shardeum, utilizing sharding-technology to solve throughput issues, and a fundraise will be kicked off mid-April to support the project. I mean…
Tiger Global knights Jar App 🐯
What’s poppin — Tiger Global created a mini-storm leading a $32 million Series A round into micro-investing platform JarApp — at an eye-popping $200 million valuation! Unbelievable for a company founded barely 12 months ago!
But Jar’s growth has been just as incredible. They’ve managed to grow to 4 million+ users in under 12 months, with 1 million+ monthly actives. TechCrunch reports nearly 99% of all the users hadn’t invested in ANY asset class before.
For those hearing about this the first time, the app basically rounds off your daily purchases, and puts that money into digital gold for ya — like Acorns in the US which is already a $2.2 billion+ business.
Investing products typically come with heavy regulatory overhead, but Jar found ways to turn KYC mandates to its advantage — which has been key to its growth within its core first-time base.
Big picture — funding momentum hasn’t blinked one bit going into the new year. Jan 2022 for example one of the best Januarys on record in recent times.
Meanwhile, onto an interesting travel deal ☝️
Headout, which runs a platform for curated travel experiences & deals around the world, raised $30 million from Glade Brook Capital & Nexus Venture Partners.
Booking trips and vacays the old way on Makemytrip and Airbnb quickly gets onerous. Besides, the insta-generation is so much more into “experiences” than the 15-day euro-tour type of deals our parents’ generations adored.
Headout plays right into that shift, with business growing 800%+ since the pandemic began easing out, with 10 million+ people across 190 countries using the service to date.
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Titan made a killing during Holidays 👑
What happened — all that pent up demand, weddings, and festive consumer spending helped consumer giant Titan report class leading growth and profitability for its Oct-Dec quarter, despite Omicron lurking in the shadows.
Quick look at key numbers:
Total Revenue of ₹9.34K crores, up 34.8% YoY
Jewelry business grew 37% YoY to bring in ₹8.6K crores
Among other key segments, Wearables grew 29% YoY, while Eyewear grew 26%
Meanwhile, expansion continued unabated — Titan managed to exit the year with nearly 149 more stores added last year, taking its total store count to just about 2K nationwide.
Bottomline — Indian FMCG giants had scared the markets about consumer demand waning. Titan reassured that perhaps the problems are isolated to select segments and markets only.
Closing out — Dr. Reddy’s bets on Cannabis 🌿
What’s poppin’ — Dr. Reddy’s labs is buying out a German medical-cannabis manufacturer and distributor Nimbus Health. Deal amount wasn’t known.
Nimbus runs a mid-sized operation, making its own drugs and selling them across Europe through its own salesforce led model. Most of its products deal with issues related to pain management, sleep therapy, and other nervous system problems.
Reddy’s meanwhile is looking at Nimbus as an early and low-cost bet on a growing segment, which it can leverage to bring products into other markets as well, as regulations hopefully begin to ease.
Big picture — medical cannabis is one of the fastest growing pockets of the pharmaceutical market in Europe. Post legalization in 2017, in Germany alone the segment is growing 50%+ a year, topping $150 million+ in 2021.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🤦♂️ Omicron effect - India’s service sector activity index dropped to 51.5 in January from 55.5 in December, as Omicron made it hard to get things done.
👎 Murdered by Zuck - Facebook dragged other digital ad stocks down yesterday. Pinterest, Snapchat are now trading below their IPO prices.
✅ We gotchu - Clear Tax will directly work and integrate with top Indian crypto exchanges to make it easy for you to do your digital-asset taxes. God’s work!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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