RIL, how it hangs? 💸
Major earnings incoming, pharma remains hot, and Bezos wants Bitcoin.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
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Kicking off the week hot☕
✅ From Oscars, to Olympics — broadcaster NBC reports barely 17 million people in the west tuned in to watch the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony — a record low in nearly 33 years. Major events, which used to pull in hundreds of millions of eyeballs before are barely able to keep up anymore — as viewers remain flooded with other entertainment options (gaming, streaming, social), and as popularity of traditional TV vanes. Oscars, a dud. NBA finals in 2021, poor!
✅ Going in hot — we’re entering peak earnings season this week. Wall Street will be busy with giants Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, AMD, Boeing, Facebook, while Dalal Street’s meeting with Info Edge, Mahindra, Tata Motors, Sanofi among other hotties. Investors will be checkin’ for continuation of growth in COVID accelerated areas — cloud, ecommerce, media, EV-fication in the west, while back home, contained impact of the second wave, and signals of imminent recovery!
Motabhai, temp check🧐
Wave No.2 took its toll on Reliance’s business.
For the second quarter, revenues looked healthy, above the market’s expectations, but profits took a hit, as Ambani calls out a “complex and challenging operating environment”.
Quick look at the important stuff:
Made ₹1.4 lakh crores in total (big bump from same time last year), BUT, profits tanked 7.2% YoY to ₹12.3K crores
Oil-to-chemicals made nearly ₹1 lakh crores, 75% up YoY
Retail revenues, up 19% YoY
Jio platforms, largely unaffected by COVID — added 14.3 million new subs
Management says the old school oil-to-chemicals business is already back to pre-COVID levels of demand and profitability, but with consumer footfall still trending low, the retail empire is gonna be choppy short term.
Markets weren’t too enthralled — but everyone deserves a pass for once.
While we’re on “diversified” businesses, ☝️
Meme-favorite ITC printed a good quarter too — Revenue jumped 37%, Profits jumped 29%. Ciggy empire grew 30%+, FMCG is moving along nicely too. But the show stopper was the Paper and Packaging biz, which grew by 50%+!
Unlikely that these numbers get the stock moving out of the choke-zone, but things can only get better... am I right!
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Quick round up of Big Tech 💻
Tech news cycle was sleepy over the weekend, but here’s a summary of a couple major happenings:
Uber is bombing $2.3 billion to acquire Transplace — a logistics and shipping company that offers ground logistics services and related software to heavy industries to manage their truck fleets, payments, invoices, price broking etc. The move is supposed to help with long-term profitability, as the low-margin, volatile, ride-hailing business remains frozen.
Back in China, the purge continues — Tencent, which is one of the largest music streaming giants in the country, is now being forced to give up all exclusive music rights the company owns, to make sure a competitive environment is preserved — attacking one of the company’s cash cow businesses. Tencent agreed to comply without a fight.
Lastly, Musk’s SpaceX won a $178 million contract from NASA to carry a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, for a life discovery mission. Space X’s Falcon rockets will take the payload from earth into the space.
Quick look at another pharma deal... 🤝
What happened —private equity firm PAG disclosed it will invest $145 million into a pharma manufacturing company Acme Formulation, for a majority stake.
Acme, a contract manufacturer and outsourcer, basically helps other pharma giants set up manufacturing facilities for specific products, and then delivers outsourced production.
PAG meanwhile has a $6 billion fund it raised recently to buy high-quality companies in Asia — spending $500M+ in buying out firms across the board in India including wealth advisory biz of Edelweiss, and another pharma player Anjan Drugs.
Bottomline — COVID’s shot in the arm to the local pharma industry continues to attract big money buyers for more.
Closing out — Bezos coming for Crypto 💸
Amazon is looking to hire a Blockchain lead — with investors busy predicting products from a crypto wallet, to a payment service, to infra on AWS in the making.
Rumors have been cooking that Bezos is leading the project himself, exploring potential for a token and for $BTC as a payment mechanism, with a launch schedule as early at the end of this year. Crypto nerds going craaayy!
Why care— the only other big tech giant to embrace crypto was Facebook, who’s Libra Wallet project ended a major misfire. But Amazon enjoys a similar reach, and is more closer to commerce and payments to make things happen at a lightning speed.
Nice retirement project for Bezos if at all!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🥈 Nailed it - Weightlifter Mirabai Chanu won a silver in the 49KG category, earning India its first medal at the Tokyo Olympics. Bravo!
🍕 Incoming hot - Devyani International is all set to launch its IPO on August 4th. Save that paycheck!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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