Navi dressing up 📈

Hot fintech raises, EVs gettin' popular, and Apple comes for Android’s base.

Market summary: 📊

Another excellent day in Indian markets as bulls pick more of their favorite names out on a fire sale. US reciprocated, with growth stocks snatching a straight home run!

US:

• S&P 500 - up 2.57%

• Nasdaq - up 3.58%

India:

• Nifty 50 - up 2.07% 

• Sensex - up 2.29%

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What’s brewing hot? ☕

🙌 This game is hot — India’s local ecommerce companies were the fancy of venture investors for 2021. Total capital deployed within the online retailing space jumped as much as 175% YoY for the year apparently, to over $22 billion! That was second to only the US, which saw some ~$50 billion going to ecommerce, while China trailed at $14 billion. And probably well justified too — online spending in emerging markets is growing a whole lot faster than western regions, potentially addressing much higher penetration rates too.

🐵 Jassy’s gift to investors — late in the evening, Amazon announced a 20-1 stock split, and a $10 billion share buyback program, helping its stock pop as much as 10%! To break it down for ya, stock splits are basically when companies break their shares into smaller pieces, so people can easily afford them. In this case, Amazon’s ~$3,000 something stock will now be in the ~$150 range. Buybacks are when companies typically see no other better place to invest for growth, so they spend excess cash on buying back their own shares in the open market. Both moves generally help stock prices see a bump!

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Bansal’s 2nd venture is ready to IPO, before Flipkart 🥳

What’s poppin’ — Navi Technologies, the latest startup founded by Sachin Bansal barely 4 years ago, is ready to hit the street — planning on filing its papers for a ₹4,000 crores IPO by the end of this week.

Kicked off in 2018, and backed by almost 50% of his Flipkart payout, Bansal built the business very closely to how Bajaj Finserv, or HDFC, or other traditional financial services successes had been built in India — a bit less digital-glitz (intentionally), a strong regulatory foundation, and omnichannel distribution.

Navi today plays in 3 core verticals — Insurance, Lending, and Asset Management, serving 3 million monthly active users. It runs a loan book of well over ₹3,500 crores, rapidly growing.

In the year ending March 2021, the company was topping ~₹770 crores in revenues, with 10% profit margins. Wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers are easily 2-3x by now!

Bottomline — for Bansal, after being pushed out as CEO post Tiger’s muscling in 2016, getting to the “IPO” milestone faster than his old company can figure out unit economics, gotta be a sweet victory. Take that, Lee Fixel.

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Fintech keeps pulling big money 💰 

In the latest, MoneyView, an instant credit platform, closed a $75 million Series D from Tiger Global, Dream Incubator and a few others — at a $625 million valuation. 

The 8-year-old business offers personal loans, and has most recently ventured into BNPL, with average ticket sizes going from ₹5K to ₹5L. MoneyView’s apps are clocking a million downloads monthly, and with annual loan volumes of $700 million+. 

Fresh money will be put to growth, and to focus on other verticals like insurance. 

Then switching over to enterprise software, 👇

Atlan, a project management tool specifically for data-teams, raised a $50 million round from Salesforce, Sequoia, and Insight — at a $450 million valuation!

If you’re an analyst or ever worked with a team that handles data, you know how folks have to switch back and forth between a mountain of files, documents, workbooks, reports, with no efficient way to keep track of where everybody stands.

Atlan connects with all your data files and sources and lets people post updates, share files, manage access and communications in a simpler, faster, well-designed tool. The business founded in 2018 operates in 12+ countries.

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EV adoption is actually picking up in India 🔌

What happened — as local electric vehicle industry switches into the next gear, Indian consumers have been decisively embracing the new tech. ET says, for the month of Feb, electric 2-wheeler sales jumped 433% YoY, while passenger car sales jumped almost 300% YoY.

These numbers are on a low base, so the growth rates look a bit out of whack. But regardless, the shift is amply visible and we’re at the start of a long long run.

In stats, passenger vehicle units sold jumped from 593 units last year, to 2,352 in this Feb. 2 wheelers jumped from 6,083 units to 32,443 units sold!

Meanwhile, the auto companies are stepping up spending. Upstarts like Ola, Ather, Bounce, as well as oldies like Hero Electric, TVS, have all lined up thousands of crores in spending on facilities, sales, distribution.

Big picture — the current Ukraine crisis and its impact on fuel prices will be another strong tailwind pushing further adoption through the year.

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Closing out — Apple wants price-conscious consumers 🤙 

After selling more a billion iPhones around the world, Apple’s next lap of growth is all about going after Android’s base. Especially the ones not-so passionate about “open” software, and wouldn’t mind giving IOS a shot.

Apple’s playbook is simple — get them in for cheap, and then monetize them more effectively via services. To that end, came the $429 iPhone SE with 5G out of the Apple-camp last night. Reviews are mixed as you’d expect, but then if critics mattered, Apple wouldn’t be a $2 trillion dollar company! 🤷‍♀️

There was a host of other things launched, here’s a quick look: 🧐

• iPhone SE comes with an A15 Bionic chip, similar to the premium iPhones. It’s a notch smaller though, and also has Touch ID huh. About ₹40K in India. Whatsapp uncles will love it!

• Apple brought in a new chip called M1 Ultra. Apple says it supports up to 128 GB of RAM, and claims to be 8x faster than the standard M1 chip! Millennial workers cheer!

• New desktop setup called the Mac Studio — created specifically for creative professionals. The screen is sold separately for a whopping $1,599. So Apple 🙄

Here’s an elaborate coverage of everything that they rolled out, including a new iPad Air, live-sports in the US on Apple TV, and IOS 15.4 (coming out this week) that will let people use Face ID with a mask on!

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What else are we Snackin’ 🍿

🙌 Everybody quits - giving in to public pressure, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Starbucks joined a growing list of US companies, quitting the Russian markets. Seems trivial, but average public life is rekkt. 

📈 Good jump - despite a volatile market environment, equity mutual fund investments saw capital inflows grow almost 32% in February to ~₹20K crores.

👍 SEBI gives a thumbs up - LIC was okayed by SEBI to go ahead with its IPO. SEBI’s approval came 22 days — one of fastest ever lol. Due diligence much?

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