Playing the long game 🤝
Space travel, More unicorns, and Air India's suitors.
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Market summary: 📊
After dropping for 4 straight days, India turned around for modest gains on Wednesday. US had a positive day as well, with growth names back in fashion.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.85%
Nasdaq - up 0.78%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.80%
Sensex - up 0.82%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Space travel — 4 common citizens blasted off to space on a SpaceX rocket a few hours ago, becoming the first set of private citizens to ever go on a casual space trip. The crew will go about 80 miles above the international space station, stay in the Crew Dragon capsule for 3 days, see earth from a custom designed observation glass dome from inside the capsule, and then drop back on earth in the Atlantic Ocean a few days later. Netflix already has a documentary on the mission’s planning and training. Wild times!
✅ Bro you joke? — GOI is apparently valuing LIC at $109 billion for its upcoming IPO, a massive discount to the $200-$300 billion valuation Dalal street had been expecting, looking to sell 5-10% of the business to public investors. Undervaluing the business essentially leaves money on the table for GOI, but works great for investors, setting the stock up for a big ass pop right through the gates. IPO subscription stats gonna look lit.
Playing the long game 🧐
What happened — PharmEasy made another acquisition, buying out a hospital procurement and supply chain software provider Aknamed for about $200 million.
Aknamed basically sells a software tool loaded with data on suppliers to help large hospital chains procure everything from drugs to disposables to vaccines. Platform has about 500+ manufacturers on it, and 45,000 unique products.
PharmEasy already works with a host of pharmaceutical companies on one end to procure drugs for its online marketplace, and now it can utilize Aknamed as a channel to push those products to hospitals as well building out a B2B business line.
Big picture — a robust online consumer pharma operation, a diagnostics lab operation via Thyrocare, and now a hospital supply business, you can notice a widely integrated platform forming...
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Big balls raises 🙌
Canva is killing it — the online graphic tool raised another $200 million at a $40 billion valuation (doubling in under 6 months), making it one of Australia’s most valued companies now.
Literally everyone became either a creator or kicked off a digital project to kill boredom during COVID, and Canva’s low-cost design tool has been indispensable in arming folks. But more seriously, millions of small merchants, agencies, and makers count on it routinely for all design needs, which will help double revenues to $1B by the end of 2021.
Truly remarkable pace of execution!
Key takeaway — what's even cooler is that the founders are pledging to give away a considerable portion of their $16B+ fortune.
And then back home we had 2 quick raises, 💰
Fantasy gaming platform Mobile Premier League raised an undisclosed amount at a $2.3B valuation from Legatum (a UAE based fund), becoming India’s newest unicorn. MPL has been kicking some ass since COVID, now reporting over 80 million monthly users, with 10 million spending $ on games on the platform.
Blue collar recruitment platform Vahan raised $8 million for its Series A led by Khosla Ventures. The company gives gig economy companies (Uber, Ola, Zomato), the tools to hire gig workers at scale, without having to go through middlemen, who usually take hefty commissions and are notorious for bad worker practices. Vahan was funded by YC a while ago.
GOI bets on automotive production 🚗
What happened — GOI passed a ₹26,000 crore production linked incentive scheme for the auto sector in India, directed at supercharging domestic EV component manufacturing.
In simple words, new as well as existing automobile makers and component manufacturers, India based or foreign, will get tax incentives, subsidies and other doles if they want to invest in building facilities making parts for EVs.
Quick look at the details:
GOI places incentives worth ₹26K crores
Expected to drive investments of upto ₹45K crores and production of over ₹2.3 lakh crore in goods
Could create 7.5 lakh new jobs
Here’s Moneycontrol.
Big picture — production shortages, and readiness of the domestic EV industry with necessary infra to “scale”, is considered one of the biggest bottlenecks to India’s ev-fication. This is a shot at the target.
Closing out — AirIndia bids are sealed ✈️
GOI’s plan of selling Air India got 2 bids — one from Tata, and the other from SpiceJet Chairman Ajay Singh, who is apparently bidding in personal capacity.
Once the docs are reviewed, GOI is expected to clear out ₹43K crores of debt that Air India has, and hand over all assets to one of the bidders. With travel bouncing back, the timing couldn’t have been better, but there’s plenty of heavy lifting scheduled for whoever wins the bride here.
While we’re on travel, 📈
SpiceJet bounced a nice 7% yesterday after announcing several new routes (domestic and international) all ready to make the most of travel recovery. With the holiday season coming up, expectations are slowly starting to build on the entire segment.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💻Fixing talent crunch - MSFT will upskill over 1.5 lakh Indian youth with tech skills to increase employability, or in other words, basically ensuring there’s enough talent pool that knows about MSFT’s cloud services.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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