Netflix, finally!
Real estate heartbeat, Zuck's gift, and Venture raises.
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Market summary: 📊
So far, looking like a good week in the making as India adds more amidst all the IPO enthusiasm. US turned around to give tech stocks a hard beating without cause.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.33%
Nasdaq - down0.71%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.44%
Sensex - up 0.48%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Zuck gon make you rich — Facebook, finally capitulates to the YouTube way of enriching its creators — and will build a $1 billion fund to support content creators on its platforms, both FB Blue and Instagram. Billion dollars is a sizable pot, and with TikTok putting leading creators on contracts, the move shows Zuck’s commitment in fighting it out. Also mildly interesting that $1B was exactly what Facebook had spent to acquire Insta 9 years ago. What a play that has been!
✅ Team Ambani expands — Ambani dialed up Just Dial with an acquisition offer, valuing the 25 year old digital directory of B2B suppliers at $900 million. Country’s largest retailer, with big bets on hyperlocal retail and ecommerce, buying out the biggest search engine for local services offers some serious strategic options and synergies. Post deal, RIL will own 60%, while JD founder will still run the ship. Regulator approval likely gonna be a hurdle to jump, but you know how shit works with Motabhai…
Netflix, ready to fight, nosedives into gaming ⚔️
Netflix, in a rare strategic move expanding its focus, announced it’ll be launching streamable games on its platform in about a year.
WTF is that — unlike how you need an Xbox or a PlayStation console to play high-quality games today, the future of gaming is where you pick a controller on your coffee table, click a button, and boom… you start competing with a friend or a bot, without having to pay for expensive hardware or new games each time!
High bandwidths and most importantly low latencies of 5G is believed to be the most important enabler that will bring about this shift 👏
May not sound like a big deal for you yet, but analysts believe the future of living room entertainment will be more “immersive”, and big tech is heavily invested in making that happen.
Going forward — markets had been anticipating Netflix to move aggressively beyond “movies” and into Live events, Sports for quite some time now, and this sets the tone for the next 10 years for the company.
Big picture — diversifying focus is one way of confusing competition like Disney, HBO, but is a potent hedge against would be competitors Roblox, Fortnite, TikTok — all increasing owners of consumer mindshare.
And the $200B gaming industry vs. $70B movie industry is a TAM multiplier investors are gonna wholeheartedly love 🚀
Venture Street flooded in Cash 💰
First up, news aggregator Inshorts raised $60 million from Vy Capital, doubling valuation to $550 million 💸
The bite-sized news distributor has scaled to nearly 10 million daily active users, expanding beyond English into a bunch of regional languages. Meanwhile, the real trump card that led to this big money raise is Inshorts’ vernacular social network called Public, kind of a merge between Facebook and news, which has scaled to 60 million downloads in 2 years.
Fresh capital will fuel growth there, and monetization via local ads and commissions.
Key takeaway — that’s another major raise for a vernacular platform in the past week itself. Heartland India’s content boom is real.
Meanwhile, global Fintech snatched a win 💥
UK’s most valuable fintech, neo-bank Revolut, closed a mammoth $800 million Series E round led by Tiger Global and Softbank, with valuation multiplying 6x to $33 billion!
Plenty of skepticism floats in public markets about consumer fintech businesses, and yet the unfettered optimism of late stage VCs is quite something. Anyway, Revolut has 16 million+ customers globally, and made $361 million last year, still losing a shit ton of money.
How them apartments selling? 🏠
Growth is finally returning to India’s real estate market, particularly in major urban centers, as 16 months into the pandemic millennial nesters realize the move-back-in-with-mummy-papa ain’t exactly working that great...
Top 12 urban centers saw home sales volume spike 67% for the last quarter, unfazed in the face of the second wave. FYI, real estate volumes had dropped to nada same time last year, so the growth is a bit skewed, but even then the bump is quite rich.
Developers see confidence, and new launches have spiked too. ₹50 lakhs to ₹ 1cr bucket is the most popular category — hinting at professional class’ strength with all those savings from Work From Home put to use.
Big picture — state of the real estate market is a proxy for the non-tax-paying parallel economy in India, which even if you dislike it, is essential to the core India machine. Recovery is a good sign.
Closing out on 2 quick updates from Dalal Street 📋
Wipro joined its IT gang TCS and INFY in blasting its earnings — revenues up 12%, profits up 9%, and management hints at a stellar >10% growth year in the making. The consensus has been established that IT companies are coming out of this rut stronger than ever, looking at a bright cloud-fueled growth future. HODL them stonks!
Meanwhile, FMCG giant Marico is already putting its fortune to work, buying out the company that owns ayurvedic beauty and care brand “Just Herbs” — adding a strong candidate to Marico’s continually expanding direct-to-consumer portfolio. CEO expects to build a ₹100 crore business of multiple emerging brands by 2023, as a hedge against any disruption from DTC startups.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🐦End of story - Fleets will be buried by Twitter starting August 3, in one of the rarest shows of execution speed for Dorsey’s product team. Good riddance!
🛵 Ola leaning - Ola Electric started bookings for its electric scooter with a refundable fee of ₹499, promising imminent launch. Elon style cheap capital raising, nice Bhavish!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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