Paypal wants to pin it 📍
Tesla delivers, FIFA upset, and Trump still got it.
Market summary: 📊
India’s downward trend continued into another day, starting to hurt a lil. US continued to rise up, as investors took confidence from positive tech earnings.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.30%
Nasdaq - up 0.66%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.48%
Sensex - down 0.55%
What’s brewing hot ☕
✅ Billion doses, bravo! — India administered a billion COVID vaccines, turning around to beat skeptics after a rocky start to the immunization campaign. 👏
✅ Souring affair — soccer federation FIFA and gaming company EA-Games are reportedly walking out of their 3 decade long partnership that brought us several editions of the EA-FIFA computer games. Lots of details, but rumors are that FIFA wants EA to pay more money in licensing fees every year (about $300M total), and wants to restrict the use of its trademark. Meanwhile EA is asking for wider access to FIFA’s name, so it can launch more games, virtual tours, NFTs etc., which clashes with FIFA’s own ambitions. Current deal will be on until the Qatar World Cup next year.
PayPal & Pinterest? WTF 👀
Wall Street lost it after news broke that PayPal, the OG web-payments giant, is apparently chasing down social platform Pinterest with a $45 billion check in hand — marking a major shift beyond its core payments business.
Don’t see $45B deals routinely — which could make this one of the largest consumer internet purchases worldwide, topping Salesforce’s $28B Slack takeout, Microsoft’s $26B for LinkedIn, and FB’s $22B Whatsapp deal.
Why Pinterest tho — the image-first platform is a staple for millennial moms, home-makers, and hobbyists to “find inspiration” for hobbies, craft, home decor ideas etc., which makes an ecommerce extension natural for it. Now PayPal is somewhat keen on building a super-app of “merchant tools” — offering digital sellers on its platform the whole “toolkit” to find, monetize, and retain customers, thinking that will boost payment volumes and take on savvier guys like Shopify, Square etc.
For example:
PayPal spent $4B on Honey a couple years ago, a groupon-like chrome-extension service for merchants to pitch deals to customers
Then it bought Paidy, a BNPL player, again to get merchants to offer credit at checkout
Besides, seen ad-rates on FB, Snap, Twitter lately? Rescuing PINS and bringing it to camp PayPal, the company could bundle free-advertising for merchants into its payments processing product.
Market reaction — was weird. Both stocks were dancing all over the place, with wall street talking heads appearing lost and confused on how to piece it all together.
Big Picture — the DIY online-selling ecosystem is about to heat up, as competition intensifies, and consolidation picks up.
Latest from Venture Town 💰
Hyperlocal social media platform, Lokal, raised $12 million in a Series A round from Tencent, Y Combinator, and a bunch of others.
Lokal’s mobile app is kinda like a merge between FBGroups, Craigslist, and Linkedin — where folks can connect with others in their neighborhood, as well as upskill, find jobs, and stay updated with local news and happenings.
The service operates across 25+ major districts right now, with 10M+ users.
Then another raise and an acquisition ☝️
Cred bought out alcohol delivery player HipBar. HipBar’s core business has gone kaput over the years, but the company was one of the 37 or so startups to have a payments-wallet licence, which CRED wants as it looks to build a tighter pool of services around lending, payments, and spending for its base of users.
Lastly, SaaS startup Sourcewiz closed a $3 million seed round led by Blume Ventures and Alpha Wave Incubation. Sourcewiz’s software, kinda like Shopify, helps exporters digitize their operations — from payments, logistics, as well as customer-facing tasks like building product catalogs.
Tesla is really putting up some good numbers 💸
Shrugging off chip shortages, labor problems, and supply chain problems, Tesla managed to deliver another record breaking quarter — with good profitability.
Quick look at the numbers:
Firstly, revenue of $13.6 billion, grew 56% YoY — that’s ecommerce like growth for a freaking car company
Profits jumped nearly 5x vs. last year to $1.6 billion
Delivered a record 240K+ vehicles
Meanwhile, the operating model continues to improve with a 5%+ expansion in margins. In all, despite all the skepticism, they’re surely delivering much better than expected, but the $800B+ valuation is quite a laaaarrrgeee bogey to grow into!
Meanwhile, Squid Games helped Netflix win 🔥
Until mid-2021, Netflix was finding it hard to pull in new subscribers. Then came a weird-ass Korean dark thriller, and here we are…. The company smashed all market expectations to add 4.4 million subscribers in the third quarter, growing revenues 16% YoY to $7.5 billion! Stock was flying by the end of today.
Fun fact — a whopping 142 million households watched Squid Games over 4 weeks. What a marketing machine.
Closing Out — Trump’s got a social platform 🥴
The US got its own version of Koo, lol. After getting himself banned from Twitter, Facebook and Youtube, Trump is lost for “voice”, particularly as the 2024 election pre-game looms. So the Don launched his own app — Truth Social.
The platform will be owned by a new entity formed via a SPAC merger of Trump Media and Digital World Acquisition, which went public today, and despite all the trolling soared 350% on Day 1 lol. Right back at ya….
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
👎 Gave in - Google finally caved and dropped the subscription fee on its Play Store to 15% starting January 1st.
👑 Jio still king - Reliance added more subs than competition for August, keeping its leadership. Vodafone continues to die a slow, painful death.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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