Pizza IPO 🍕
Diwali spend, SBI earnings, and Goa's ed-tech victory!
Market summary: 📊
Good start to the week post Diwali in India. US kicked off the week on a soft note — despite all the hoopla around the infrastructure bill.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.089%
Nasdaq - down 0.14%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.85%
Sensex - up 0.80%
Quick shot of espresso ☕
✅ Google joins the elite — with YouTube growing up to become a bigger business than Netflix, and Google Cloud kicking serious-ass under Thomas Kurian’s leadership, Alphabet joined the elite $2 trillion market cap club yesterday — alongside Apple and Microsoft. Google’s useless spending on Moonshot projects made them extremely unpopular on Wall Street for a bit, until the whip-cracking of CFO Ruth Porat tamed the giant.
✅ Revenge spending peaks — CAIT says Diwali-time consumer spending blew the doors off this time — with Indian consumers spending over ₹1.2 lakh crores on sweets, merch, gadgets, gifts, and everything else — nearly 2x more than what was spent in 2019. Hard to tease out how much of this is one-time post-COVID revenge spending though, or if a more sustained trend in recovery. Or perhaps just some $SHIB effect.
Fintech to Pizza, IPO market offers everything 🍕
What’s happening — after PayTM, fast-food seller Sapphire Foods, which runs a whole bunch of KFCs and Pizza Huts in India, is set to go live today — looking to raise ₹2,073 crore from the public markets.
Sapphire is the largest franchisee around here of Yum Brands!, the global-company that owns brands like KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell — running nearly 450 restaurants for them across India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.
Last year, the business made about ₹1,019 crores in revenues, still losing ₹99 crores, but losses narrowing — despite COVID’s difficulties.
Fyi, another one of Yum’s India franchisees, Devyani International, had gone public a while ago — and the markets had loved the bid.
Bottomline — if you believe fast food joints, specially western, will continue to appeal to a growing consumer class in India, Fire away!
While we’re on IPOs, 🥱
PayTM’s bid was subscribed just 18% on Day 1. Portion reserved for the average joe was full like 78%, but response from institutional money and high-net worth fellas was a bit more measured than anticipated.
FWIW, skeptics are worried about rising competition, shrinking margins, and toooo-much hanging on strong economic recovery. Prove em wrong!
SBI is the real money spinner 💸
So far this quarter, banks in India have had a banger earnings season. The country’s OG bank capped it off on a phenomenal note — with excellent growth in revenue and profit, coupled with significant improvements in asset quality.
Quick look at the numbers:
Interest income of ₹31.2K crores, up 29% YoY — shows people are paying bills, a good proxy for consumer strength
Profits of ₹7.6K crores, up 67% YoY —SBI’s highest ever
Home loans grew 10.74%; Total deposits were up 10% YoY
SBI’s non-performing assets, or basically loans that went kaput, declined to 1.52% of its loan book (teeny-tiny improvement from last quarter).
What to make of it — in the first half of 2021, nobody had any clue how the banks would handle all the economic blowback from the second wave. These numbers offer more relief than anything.
Meanwhile, inflation eats Britannia’s cookies 📉
Profits for the Tiger biscoot-maker tanked 23% YoY — essentially because of rise in the prices of key raw materials. Almost all FMCG companies have been complaining about the impact of rising costs this quarter, so no surprises really. $Britannia has now been a dud for 6 months.
Quick temp-check on Venture Street 💰
First up, BrightChamps, a Goa based edtech venture, closed a $63 million round from Premji Invest, GSV Ventures, and a few others, at a $500 million valuation!
BrightChamps supplements school-learning with foundational courses in logic, design thinking, mathematics, that lead up to coding — delivered via live 1:1 sessions. The platform works with a global approach and has expanded to 10+ markets already. Standard playbook for plenty of Indian ed-tech ventures lately!
Looking at crypto for a bit here, 👇
Cricket based NFT-platform, Faze App, raised $17.4 million in a seed round from Tiger Global, Sequoia and Dapper Labs.
Faze is working with ICC to create historical cricketing moments and memorabilia, tokenized, to be sold to fans across the world on the Flow blockchain. NFT collection will be launched over the next few weeks, and a full-blown attempt at the metaverse is in the pipeline. Curious for sho! 👀
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚀 China’s win - Wang Yaping made history as the first Chinese-woman astronaut to walk in space. Yaping was part of the mission sent to spend time and test out China’s under-construction space station.
⏳ Coming soon - SEBI okay’ed India’s stock exchanges to roll out T+1 trade-settlement starting from Feb 25 of next year.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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