Revenge shoppin’ 💁‍♀️

Crypto problems, Big tech deals, and Disney got no workers.

Jun 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:

What’s brewing hot? ☕

✅ Some political drama — IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad got himself restricted from Twitter for violating copyright laws by sharing an AR Rahman song, which Sony believes was distributed without permission. Twitter reversed the action within a couple hours, but damage was done already, with the furious IT ministry demanding justification and giving Twitter another negative score in GOI’s books. Meanwhile, Twitter’s grievance officer quit a few hours later — no apparent connection, but very likely an offering to please the overlords. What a joke!

✅ Crypto winter incoming — UK regulators slammed an absolute ban on one of the largest global crypto exchanges, Binance, for non-compliance with local regulations as well as for luring consumers with silly ads online. Regulators demand Binance stop promotions ASAP and take down the website. Binance trades nearly 8x more volumes that Coinbase does, so expect coins to take a dump.

Sundays are total lazy news days! Nothing huge, but a bunch of lil things to cover… quick rundown.

What’s recovery? Ask Nike ☑️

With global consumers starting to return to in-store shopping, brands on mainstreet are expected to have an outstanding second half of 2021. Nike’s quarterly earnings offered an early hint into just how exhilarating the party really is…

Quick look at the quarter:

Revenues of $12 billion, up 96% YoY — that’s some startup-level shit for a 40 year old shoe company!
E-commerce sales of $3 billion, up 41% YoY
300 million global online customers
North America up 29% YoY, China up 17% — although that party was a bit dented coz of consumers boycotting western brands in between

Otherwise, Margins increased, profits improved, and management’s upbeat commentary on momentum sticking for the rest of the year helped Nike stock end last week up ~20%.

Big picture — retail that survived the ecommerce coup, and now COVID’s brutal assault, has been hardened into steel, set to thrive like never before.

Quick look at Venture Street 💰

Payment giant Mobikwik raised $20 million from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, at a $700 million valuation — barely a month after the company’s shameful hack that left data on 10M+ users exposed.

Not many metrics around the raise were released, but rumors suggest Mobikwik is planning an IPO for the end of the year — looking to sell $160 million to public investors, trying to front run rival PayTM’s bid. When the numbers drop, a comparison would be exciting.

Meanwhile, an ongoing RBI-forced forensic audit of the hack is an overhang.

Turning heads to a beverage deal for a change, ☝️

Domestic craft beverage brand Bira-91 is courting private equity giants to raise about $100 million — right in time for an anticipated EPIC post recovery spending wave.

Selling primarily through offline channels, the pre-COVID Bira clocked upwards of $100 million in revenues, with a newly introduced strong-beer product line up driving thrilling results in heartland India particularly.

But unlike your avg. tech business, scaling a beer enterprise is a capital intensive endeavor — further messed up by costs of weathering the pandemic, and other cash rich players waking up to the “craft” opportunity in India. Expect the “we’re raising” signs to stay up for a while.

Big tech made some moves 🔥

What happened — AWS, Amazon’s cloud business, acquired an encrypted messaging platform Wickr, making an intriguing entry into the broad enterprise communications business. Deal valued at ~$50 million.

Wickr is basically a Zoom look-alike, albeit a bit more secure and safe, selling a suite of encrypted video conferencing and messaging services, primarily to government entities and the military. Amazon’s recent wins with major government cloud contracts could’ve moved the team to pursue the communications opportunity more vigorously. Also, a “low-overhead” tool is a great way to squeeze your feet in, and then upsell more products and services.

Turning quickly to a gaming deal 🎮

EA Sports, which usually makes games for PCs and Consoles, took a deeper dive into mobile gaming with the purchase of game developer Playdemics for $1.4 billion from WarnerMedia.

In 2021 alone, EA has spent $5 billion on tuning its portfolio to a mobile-heavy future (including buying Glu for $2B+ in Feb), as mobile as a category continues to pull the majority of the global consumer game spending.

Closing out — things on the mind of Dalal Street 👏

Quick look at what investors and the markets will be looking for as we start a new week...

IPO feast continues — India Pesticides’ IPO was oversubscribed by 30x by the end of the last bidding day, making it the 11th most subscribed bid so far of the year. After losing its footing for a month there, IPO fever finally seems to have regained balance!

After pulling money out of the markets for the past 2 months, Foreign Investors returned within 10x enthusiasm — deploying ₹12.7K crores into the markets for the month of June. ₹15K crores came chasing stonks, while debt saw withdrawals of about ₹2.5K, which offset the numbers a bit.

Going forward, this week will be dominated by how we make progress on vaccinations, public listings of Dodla Dairy and KIMS, data on how automobile sales look like for June, and a couple of earnings including SpiceJet.

What else are we snackin’ 🍿

💿 Hip Hop NFT - billionaire rapper Jay Z will sell an NFT of his debut album, Reasonable Doubt’s cover, set to auction next month.

👷 Bring em back - Disney will offer $1,000 bonus checks to hire housekeepers and kitchen staff for its theme parks. That’s 9 months after laying off 32,000 people. How them times change!

Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.

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