Ready to fire

Fords plans, sneaky Tata, and Andy taking over.

May 28, 2021

Hi 👋, Tanvi here.

Filter Coffee hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day.

Let’s go ahead and get started:

Market summary: 📊

Turning out to be a great week thus far, with India gaining some more ground Thursday. US kept dancing around, supporting tech one day, and old school giants the next.

US:

S&P 500 - up 0.12%
Nasdaq - down 0.33%

India:

Nifty 50 - up 0.24%
Sensex - up 0.19%

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ Consumer social races—months ago, there was Dispo. Today, it's Poparazzi. The brutally competitive consumer social segment saw a new horse joining the races—Poparazzi, an app that bans selfies, or filters, or captions, and only allows you to capture raw, unedited photos of your friends and family, and then tag them in an insta-like feed. Launch day saw the app top iOS charts, with VC twitter buzzing non-stop, with probably even a term sheet emailed by noon. Will be interesting though to see if folks even remember the name a week from now…

✅ Finally set the price—after months of closed door negotiations, Amazon finally closed on the MGM Studios acquisition for an $8.45 billion price tag. Both companies shook hands, but nobody knows if the government will be okay with it, especially as the US DoJ just launched a major antitrust case against AMZN the very freaking morning the deal was announced. Bezos be like...

Ready to fire 😎

PayTM, host of the Indian payments party, is all set to go public at the end of the year, looking to raise over $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, which would make it the largest Indian IPO to date. what grand style!

Anticipation had been building for quite a long time now, but jumping regulatory hoops, particularly Indian regulators’ demands for profitability, stretched the hurdles. But with SEBI softening its listing norms lately in a bid to accommodate upstarts and boost the ongoing innovation fest, we’re getting closer.

We’ll wait for the prospectus to drop sometime mid year, but the stats we have so far look nothing but excellent—20 million merchants use the platform, with nearly 350 million+ active monthly users on the other end, processing 1.4 billion+ monthly transactions.

And of course, the diversification into broad verticals like insurance, investment, entertainment, and gaming is just cherry on the top.

Bottomline: despite the epic run we’ve seen so far, the digital payments market in India is expected to grow 3X by 2025, with large portions of the addressable base still waiting to be tapped. Be sour and shortsighted about profitability, or bet on a generational freaking movement!

And honestly, we’re glad to not have lost this one to the US!

Quick look into Ford’s grand agenda 🚗

After the pompous launch of the electric truck last week at the hands of Biden, Ford announced a $30 billion spending plan to boost EV production by 2025.

In addition to investing in production facilities, the plan also outlines a pretty robust agenda to invest in R&D to support in-house battery technology—including Lithium Ion batteries, and emerging tech such as solid state batteries, attacking right at Tesla’s moat.

So far, the company’s progress has been respectable too:

Sold nearly 7,000 Mustang Mach-E electric vehicles so far in 2021
Got a 70,000 booking list on the F-150 newly launched truck

Investors LOVED the renewed direction and enthusiasm, and rewarded Ford stock up 22% in the past week, a fortune for the company that saw its market cap erode 70% in the last 5 years up until 2020!

Big picture—globally, less than 10% of vehicles are electrified today, so despite Tesla’s decade long head start, the mass market is still wayyy wayyy in the early phases. Ford, Chevy, Volvo, Toyota, all the early movers among the rest, have a serious chance to pull off transformations.

I want $10 billion, dare say no 🕴️

About a month ago, Jeff Bezos-owned space company Blue Origin was rejected for a $2.9 billion contract by NASA to take astronauts to the moon. Instead, Elon Musk’s SpaceX won it.

Jeff instantly threatened to sue, calling bias in the decision because the then Trump-admin disliked Bezos’ guts. Now to please daddy Bezos, US Senators are passing a fresh legislation, offering NASA $10 billion in more money, just so it can issue a new contract for Blue Origin.

Blue Origin may have a point—space travel is not a commercial endeavor yet, which means absent free market dynamics, investors are often risking their personal wealth to fund projects, in most cases hoping the project will receive government support when its showtime. And when that fails to happen, follow on investors lose incentives to double down on risky endeavors.

Particularly in this case, when Blue Origin demanded explanations, NASA in its defense cited a shortage of funds from Congress as the reason for rejecting them.

now do you really want to disappoint the guy worth $180 billions, who funds campaigns for probably half of the congress floor…?

No Way Chicago GIF by Wolf Entertainment

Big picture—the funding is a critical step in accelerating the private space industry, as well in helping the US secure its future in space innovation as rival nations (ahem ahem China) catch up.

Closing out—Tata coming for CureFit💰

What happened—Tata’s ambitions to digitize its salt-to-software empire has landed at the doorstep of health-tech company Curefit, with ET reporting that an acquisition may be brewing.

No price is known, but Curefit was last valued at $800 million.

It's an intriguing match for sure. Curefit, which recently rebranded as Cult.fit, runs a broad portfolio of sleek fitness services—from home workout apps, to mindfulness, to healthy eating focused food delivery apps. All of those services were a HIT with the “at-home” active-lifestyle junta during the pandemic, with the user base swelling to at least 2 million+, and revenues topping ₹500 crores.

On the other hand, although Tata has shown ample excitement for ecommerce and fintech until now, nobody imagined a health-tech services interest. But then we’re reminded of Tata’s purchase of online pharma giant 1mg, and the possible synergies there of.

In any case, details are scant yet, but Curefit founder will apparently join a leadership role within Tata that will oversee the group’s deeper expansion in the digital space.

What happened—with BigBasket in the bag already, 1mg added recently, and now Curefit, suddenly Tata no longer looks like a lost horse in the digital-India races.

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What else are we snackin’ 💰

📅 Day one - Andy Jassy will officially take over as the CEO of Amazon on 5th July, which is also Amazon’s 27th birthday. What a ride!

🐦 Spreading wings - Twitter Spaces will be made available on desktop and mobile web browsers too, as the product fully comes out of beta. More nerd parties if that’s your sorta thing.