Mickey whopped 🐭

Reliance’s expansion continues, and stuff from the week before.

Nov 13, 2021

Market summary: 📊

After a week of straight decline, India picked some wind on Friday. US had a positive day as well, making up for the week’s decline.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.72%
Nasdaq - up 1.04%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 1.28%
Sensex - up 1.28%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ No love for fintech — Fino Payments Bank, the first fintech-play to open on the street, got a cold welcome — with stock opening about 5.6% down from the issue price of ₹577. The IPO was subscribed 2.03 times, with retail leading the party, but it looks like people are aggressively moving money around in hopes of quick payouts. Looking a bit shaky for PayTM. 🤞

✅EV wars — the field is getting crowded. Bounce, which operates dock-less rental bikes in major Indian cities, is launching its own electric bikes — joining a long-list of disruptors (Ola, Ather, Revolt) betting they can do it better than the OGs. Bounce’s model has an interesting twist — they’re betting India will struggle to scale the “wait-and-charge” model, so all of their bikes will be battery-swappable. Customers don't have to “buy” the battery, but “rent” it at all times from Bounce, which also drops the bike cost significantly. Here’s the product.

One For All Education GIF by Bournemouth University

House of Mickey Mouse Whopped 🤦

Disney managed to grow its streaming platform, Disney+, to 118 million subscribers by partnering with telcos, ecommerce companies, and whoever else it could find — in under 2 years since launch.

But that curve is slowly flatlining. For the last 3 months, with freebies ending and churn increasing, Disney+ added only 2.1 million subs (way below expected). For comparison, Netflix had added more than 4 million new subscribers for the past quarter — that’s on top of the 212 million they already have! Not goooood.

Markets were pissed and hit Disney stock 5%.

Thankfully, Disney’s Theme Parks and Cruise business was buzzing — now that everyone’s vaccinated, growing almost 100% YoY to $5.4 billion in revenue, saving the company’s earnings print.

Bottomline — for a bit there, Netflix was losing its grip over streaming wars, but thanks to Squid Games and host of top-class IP, its apparent who the king is!

Reliance filling up its kitty of brands 💪

What happened — Reliance Retail continues to expand its product portfolio — this time, buying out popular lingerie brand Amante from Sri Lanka’s MAS Holdings.

Amante sells premium-lingerie products under 3 major brands, online and via a dense store-network across India and Sri Lanka. FYI, Reliance also owns Zivame, the homegrown disruptor in the lingerie category in India — which RIL had bought into starting last year.

Big picture — with a strong offline + online distribution set up, Reliance has been aggressively beefing up its product-IP. Just weeks ago they bought considerable ownership in Manish Malhotra’s label, and then Ritu Kumar’s brand for apparel.

Share Filter Coffee ☕

Aight peeps, that’s all we have for today! Quick look at major stuff that went down this week…

💰 IPO tap keeps giving — fast-food seller Sapphire Foods, which runs nearly 450 KFCs, Pizza Huts, and Taco Bells, in India, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, opened its bid, looking to raise ₹2,073 crore. Then, PharmEasy dropped docs with SEBI, looking to raise ₹6,250 crore. Meanwhile, PayTM’s IPO was a meh-show, pulling in only 1.9x subscriptions, mostly led by retail. Lastly, Nykaa opened up to a grand welcome on the NSE — topping $13B+ in market cap.

🦄 35th Unicorn for India — Good Glamm Group, the company that runs beauty website MyGlamm, became India’s 35th unicorn after raising $150M for a Series D. Good Glamm is building a content-to-commerce empire, and currently runs 3 major beauty and personal care platforms — MyGlamm in cosmetics, Moms&Co in new-mother goods, and Baby Chakraa in baby products. Revenues are expected to top $250M for the next 12 months, and weeks ago they bought out ScoopWhoop to expand into more lifestyle categories.

🎮 Kids are moving on — gaming platform popular among kids, Roblox, blasted a kick-ass quarter, doubling its revenues, as young folks continue to abandon traditional social apps (like FB, Insta) for more immersive experiences. Roblox now has 47.3 million daily active users who spend a total of 11.2 billion hours on the platform. FB meanwhile, is seeing engagement from younger users drop ~15% each year.

💔 General Electric broke up into 3 companies — after a long struggle with mismanagement and poor growth, General Electric will be broken into 3 smaller entities. GE Aviation will handle GE’s core ~$22 billion airplane-engine business, then GE Healthcare, will focus on medical machines, and lastly GE’s ~$20 billion power and energy business will be spun out in 3 years. No place for old-daddies in a tech-first world!

🚚 Post-COVID M&A is picking up — Doordash will be acquiring Wolt, for $8 billion, a food delivery company based in Finland. A late entrant to the US delivery market, Doordash has quickly scaled up to own more than 50% of the market, and now they’re bringing the model globally. Meanwhile, Unity Software, the game-engine, acquired Weta Digital, the movie VFX studio behind hits like Avatar, for $1.625 billion.

✅ Coinbase growing like a weed — for the last 3 months, Coinbase made $1.23 billion in revenues, up 330% YoY, with profits of $406 million, up a whopping 400% YoY! 7.4 million monthly-transacting users rely on the platform, which processed $327 billion for the quarter. Still sleeping on crypto?

Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.

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