Market summary: 📊
India kicked off the week on a high — adding more than a percent to major indices, despite turmoil in global markets. US had a brutal day, where high flying growth stocks continue to be singled out and shot down.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.14%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.14%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.07%
Sensex - up 1.09%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
💉 He can stay — Aussie vs. Novak Djokovic took an interesting turn when a judge overturned the Tennis players’ visa cancellation, allowing him to stay in the country and defend his Australian open title. The legal battle is gaining plenty global attention as nations debate the perils of aggressive vaccine mandates.
📈 All priced in — PayTM continues to release “progress” numbers hoping for some investor mercy. For the 3rd quarter (Oct to Dec), the company apparently saw a 123% YoY growth in gross merch volumes on its platforms — processing $33.6 billion in volumes. Emerging products are showing momentum too, with the lending business initiating $1.2 billion in loans, a 400% YoY jump. Monthly transacting users grew a strong 37% YoY to 64.4 million. Stock meanwhile continues to fall like a rock — now trading more than 45% below IPO price. Ouch.
Pine flies to the West 💸
What happened — one of India’s top most payment processors, Pine Labs, filed papers with the US SEC for an IPO on Wall Street — looking to raise $500 million, at a $7 billion valuation.
Pine had disclosed its plans almost a year ago, so no hearts broken here. Western investors eagerly await the bid to get a piece of the India growth story.
If you’re catching up, Pine started in 1998 as a payment and software vendor for Petrol pump operators in India, making multiple pivots over time, to finally catch the broad digitization of payments wave over the past decade — to offer end-to-end merchant processing solutions, now doing $30B+ volumes a year.
150K+ major merchants, from malls, to multiplexes, to supermarkets run on Pine’s POS, digital wallets, invoicing, and online payments systems. There’s also a lending vertical offering urgent cash loans to merchants.
Bottomline — strong leadership, great reputation, and a B2B heavy focus (which means favorable unit economics, unlike the PayTMs and Mobikwicks)… not much to dislike.
Quick walk down Venture lane 💰
Entrackr says Moglix, the industrial goods marketplace, is talking to Tiger Global and Falcon Edge to raise another $200 million, at a $2.5 billion valuation!
That’s barely 10 months after they became a unicorn. Moglix runs what comes close to an Amazon for businesses and industrial SMEs, selling machines, electrical components, industrial tools, healthcare equipment, stationery, safety supplies, etc. to some 150K+ SMEs across the nation.
Several players within this space (Infra.Market, Zetwerk, OfBusiness), all chasing unique angles, have caught wind in their sails amidst COVIDs push to digitize.
Meanwhile, early stage fintech keeps getting $ 👇
Arthan Finance, a venture offering micro-loans to small entrepreneurs, picked up $2.5 million from Michael Dell’s Dell Foundation, along with a few angels.
Arthan offers loans with ticket-sizes ranging from ₹20K to ₹20 lakhs, often times with no collateral, mainly to shop owners, vendors, distributors, and other SMBs in Tier II and III cities.
Some 3,500 customers have been served, and fresh funds will be put to scale the loan book to ₹1K crore+ in the next 5 years.
Adam goes for Round 2 🏢
Burning through billions, almost killing a $50 billion real-estate company, and then getting booted from the job itself, isn’t enough “real-estate” for Adam Neumann.
The ex-WeWork founder and CEO, credited of running the business into ground, is spending his exit-fortune on apparently acquiring an extensive portfolio of real estate across upcoming cities in the Southern US.
Adam has so far purchased some 4,000 apartments in cities like Nashville, Miami, Atlanta — well worth over $1 billion, per WSJ.
Is it just parking money for rental yield, or some grand idea of disrupting the residential leasing business — few have a clue. Bets?
Worth mentioning — most of Adam’s fortune came from the $778 million or so Masa Son’s Softbank paid him to buy out his share, and literally get him to bugger off from WeWork.
May we recommend The Cult of We.
Closing Out — GTA meets Farmville 🤝
If you never played either of the games, you may skip this.
Take-Two Interactive, the maker of the epic GTA games, will pay $12.7 billion to buy out mobile-game king Zynga, the OG behind popular titles like Farmville.
Markets were surprised. The $15 billion Take-Two empire is trying to make a fortune beyond hardcore PC/Console games, and the mobile-first, lightweight portfolio of casual games Zynga offers (Poker, Words, and all other casual staples) seems attractive, giving Take-Two a foot in all formats — PC, Console, Web, and Mobile.
Zynga stock jumped like 45% when the deal was announced.
Big picture — $175 billion+ will be spent on gaming in 2021, more than Hollywood, movies, or any other form of digital entertainment. Crypto, Metaverse, and general expansion of the virtual world is expected to make things even crazier.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🤝 Dump the garbage - Mahindra & Mahindra offloaded South Korean automaker SsangYong Motor for $255 million to a group of companies. SsangYong struggled with debt and tanking sales.
📈 Good growth - India’s telco sector saw a 4.2% sequential growth in revenue in the July-September quarter. Gods working for Vodafone.
💰 Massive fortune - Bloomberg says the CEO of Binance, CZ, is worth close to $100 billion, outside his crypto holdings, putting him right alongside elites like Zuck, Page, and Gates.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀