More Bazookas 🔫
Popular IPO, upskilling push, and Hasura’s feat.
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Market summary: 📊
Previous day’s global market weakness seeped into India yesterday, with markets ending slightly down. US markets showed strong signs of rebound though, yet are trading below all time highs.
US:
S&P 500 - up 2.01%
Nasdaq 100 - up 2.96%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.35%
Sensex - down 0.45%
Planet before profits, literally. 🙄
Uber came out with a surprising commitment to become a zero-emissions company by 2040, claiming that all journeys will be completed via electric vehicles in the US, Canada and Europe by then.
The company vowed to contribute $800 million through 2025 to help drivers switch to battery-powered vehicles, including offering financial incentives for buying vehicles through select partners. The company will also put more dollars into micro mobility options.
Uber said its goal is to reduce the overall cost of ownership of its cars to drivers, as the per mile cost of driving an EV is much lower than that of gasoline. However, critics believe a sly motive of appeasing regulators might also be at play here as the company has gotten itself into hot water over low wages paid to drivers.
Takeaway: Well, yes we can all get behind carbon neutrality and saving the planet, BUT when that bold promise requires a considerable financial commitment from a company that’s yet to turn a meaningful profit and is regularly accused of underpaying its drivers, it sounds a bit pretentious.
While we’re on the subject,
India’s top power utility, NTPC Ltd., has planned to add at least 5 GW solar capacity over the next two years, as part of its effort to generate 30 GW of energy via renewables by 2030. NTPC currently runs the largest fleet of coal based capacity in India, and a commitment from them adds to the positive sentiment for the renewable energy cause in India. Read more.
Modest upskilling boost 💪
The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) has been quietly making strides to get India digitally equipped and skilled. After partnerships with Apple, Google and Facebook that would upskill thousands, most recently the corp has partnered with Linkedin for mass tech-upskilling.
Under the partnership, 10 free LinkedIn Learning paths, consisting of 140 courses for a range of in-demand tech jobs, will be made available for free on eSkill India digital platform till March 31, 2021. Linkedin will also equip the NSDC with free insights on the labour market using its economic graph on over 69 million members in India. This will include idenityfing in-demand skills, emerging jobs, and global hiring data to help NSDC better understand demands of the skilling and employment ecosystem.
According to LinkedIn data, Indian professionals with digital skills are 20% more in demand than professionals without digital skills on average, and as we grapple with an unprecedented economic plague and unemployment conditions, all help is well appreciated. Read more.
Notable capital moves… 💰
Highway operator Cube Highways and Infrastructure has been granted a ₹3,500 crore loan for 20 years at a 8% interest rate by the State Bank of India, to facilitate the purchase of a bundle of roads assets auctioned by the government for private entities to manage and operate, under the Toll-Operate-Manage model.
The company had won the ₹5,011 crore contract back in December 2019 to manage about 2,265 km of lanes across four states. This support by SBI is one of the largest of this kind in India’s road management industry.
Turning heads to furniture for a bit,
IKEA, the largest furniture retailer in the world, and life saviour of nest building millennials believes it can replicate its global charm in India as well, and will raise ₹5,000 crore to see through that outcome. Capital will be spent on launching more outlets in the country.
And finally, in a high profile SaaS raise,
Developer tooling startup, Hasura, snatched $25 million in a highly contested Series B raise led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The best part was John Thomspon, the Chairman of the Board at Microsoft pitching into the round, marking a solid vote of confidence from enterprise leaders for India’s burgeoning SaaS industry. The company essentially builds a modular data integration platform that allows developers to combine, and access multiple databases via a unified GraphQL based API. Fresh funds will go into hiring and sales expansion.
Buy buy… buy it all! 💸
One of the hottest IPOs coming out of India this year, for IT services company Happiest Minds, has been oversubscribed 150 times over by the third and final day of bidding on Wednesday.
A cloud-first IT services company, Happiest Minds’ business spans managing infrastructure, selling custom engineering services and providing other business management services for enterprise clients. The company represents a new breed of consulting practices coming out of India suited for the cloud-first modern IT era. They work with most leading infrastructure providers Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce etc. and per disclosure have about 156 customers, with a 77% revenue base in the US. Investors seem thrilled by prospects.
The IPO will fetch the company about ₹702 crores, fueling sales and product expansion. Here are all the details you need to know.
What’s up in techland? 🖥️
Slack got hammered last night after second quarter earnings failed to enthuse investors. The communications company managed to grow revenue by 49%, but investors couldn’t help draw comparisons with Zoom’s 300%+ growth rates. Finally, a weak billings number (basically deferred revenue from existing contracts that are yet to be served) became the straw that broke the camel’s back and stock came crumbling down 15%.
Few highlights from the print:
Revenue of $216M
Billings of $218M, much lower than $226M Wall Street was expecting
Company now has 130,000 customers
Despite the pandemic benefiting remote enabling companies, Slack has had a problem getting investors excited about its weaker-than-peers growth rates. Microsoft’s Teams — a competitive product gaining ground rapidly is partly responsible as well.
Moving on,
Apple will conduct its annual new device and software launch event on September 15, remote this time just like the WorldWide Developers Conference the company organized in June.
Apple’s event is usually a star studded gathering (the tech nerds kinda stars) in Cupertino, CA and this is perhaps the first time the company will go virtual with it. Apple Watch and the 5G iPhone are the two most awaited products of 2020.
Billion here and a billion there 😎
Silver Lake, the private equity firm based out of California, seems creepily obsessed with the Indian markets. After investing $1.35B in Reliance Jio in two rounds through 2020, then leading a $500 million round for Unacademy last week, the company has returned with another billion dollars in the bag meant for Reliance Retail. To remind you, Reliance is looking to start a new chapter after it acquired Future Retail’s debt laden assets.
The deal will offer Silver Lake a 1.75% stake, valuing Reliance Retail at about $57 billion. The transaction is pending regulatory approval. Dalal Street however isn’t pleased much because overenthusiastic analysts had slapped a much higher valuation on RIL’s retail play.
Anyhoo, the deal offers Reliance valuable ammunition to keep mounting assault on competitors. Also, after seeing these two companies cozying up, another private equity firm KKR, caught the FOMO and has now expressed its own interest in putting a billion dollars more into Reliance Retail.
Diwali has come early at Antilia
Bottomline: Mukesh Ambani is writing history, everyday. The fact that he’s able to woo investors in the middle of a once in a century economic slowdown is what has us even more awestruck! And if I were Bezos, I’d look for all levers at my disposal to limit the scope of this crusade as it gives RIL unlimited bazookas in its artillery. Or wait…. that’s probably why Amazon had been looking to buy 10% of Reliance Retail for itself as well. Circle of life.
Tweet of the day -
The US west coast is being ravaged by massive wildfires. The images of blankets of ash and smoke all over San Francisco are mesmerizing.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🙁 Elon’s had better days - Musk’s wealth plunged $16.3 billion overnight on news of a partnership between competitors Nikola Corp and the largest American car maker General Motors. Despite that, Musk is worth $82.3 billion, strong at the 5th place on the list of world’s richest people.
💉 Progressing to the next phase - The Government along with Indian vaccine manufacturers are willing to facilitate a phase 3 trial for Russia’s Sputnik V and are in talks with Gamalaya National Research Center for mass manufacturing of the vaccine. World scientists still hold their reservations on the vacc.
📱 Let the assault begin - Reliance Jio is planning to make 10 crore low cost android phones which will be built on Google’s Android platform. The phones will be bundled with data packs and are expected to be launched somewhere by December 2020. This decision comes after Google said it will invest $4.5 billion in Jio.
👏 Upping health infra - Air Ambulance services for long distance emergency travel have been launched by a BLR based air ambulance company, International Critical Air Transfer Team, and an Aviation firm Kyathi, to better serve the people across Southern India. The move is a relief for thousands when transportation across the country remains mildly frozen.
🛒 Operations expansion - AMZN India is planning to set up 5 new centers to improve the speed of deliveries as it gears up for the upcoming festive sales season. The new centres are to be set up in Vishakhapatman, Farukhnagar, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Ahmedabad. Bored, locked down consumers are expected to finally open up their wallets to lighten up the mood.
🏛️ Apple sues Epic - Apple has filed a counterclaim against Epic games asking for lost app store fees and ordering to stop the Fortnite maker from operating its own in-app payment system. Apple claims Epic has earned almost $600 million via the App Store.
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