RIL’s green dress 🗼
Tiger adds to cart, Tok's big moves, and Visa takes its revenge.
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Market summary: 📊
After a mid week stumble, India returned to add positive gains on Thursday. While Wall Street, after a rather boring 2021 so far, finally seems to have regained some mojo too.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.75%
Nasdaq - up 0.64%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.66%
Sensex - up 0.74%
Friday shot of espresso ☕
✅ Ecommerce, still so young — Amazon’s Prime Day soiree turned out to be quite a hit — with consumers spending $11 billion in total, about 6.1% up from last year. Growth seems a bit underwhelming honestly, but adjusting for ecommerce indigestion, the market’s don’t seem to be complaining. 250 million items were sold (consumerism FTW), with robotic vacuum cleaners and coffee makers being some of the top items. Not surprised!
✅ Make room for a media SPAC — click-bait king BuzzFeed is going public via a SPAC, looking to raise $$ to roll up other interesting niche media and content businesses. With ad-prices spiking to all time highs, and platforms like FB, Google somewhat looking stale and saturated with ads, BuzzFeed is telling investors it sees a gap for alternatives to thrive. Valuation will be sealed at $1.5 billion.
Mota bhai, where next? 🧐
Most of Dalal Street was busy yesterday with the Reliance annual general meeting — a ritual that India’s traditional investors wouldn’t dare miss.
Ambani laid out a comprehensive agenda in addition to giving color on the state of the empire’s transformation into a digital-first entity. Here’s the major things:
Reliance’s Google-powered low cost smartphone, JioPhone Next, is coming in Sep
Saudi’s state oil company Aramco will invest in Reliance’s Oil and Chemicals business, with the Chairman joining Reliance’s board
MASSIVE investment into green energy — spending ₹75,000 crores over 3 years to build giga factories to make fuel cells, solar photovoltaic modules, energy storage systems, etc. attacking clean power to EV infra
5G trials are going well, will shift focus on deployments this year
In commerce and digital, RIL guided for 3x growth in volumes of Reliance HyperMart, will scale rapidly to 1 crore kiranas — startups sweatin much?
Oh and BTW — in 2019, Aramco had shown interest in buying 20% of Reliance’s Oil-to-Chems business for about $15 billion, but talks dragged out because of COVID and Aramco’s IPO in between. RIL now says some deal should be worked out in the next 1-2 years.
Bottomline — at this point, it's simple AF. If you’re comfortable buying overpriced tech IPOs and loss-making growth tech names, you’ve gotta be silly to not be long on a cash-machine with equally promising prospects in equally exciting verticals.
Tiger keeps adding to its bag 👜
GoMechanic, a car services marketplace, raised a $42 million Series C round led by Tiger Global, with Sequoia, Orios and Chiratae Ventures pitching in.
GoMechanic business is pretty simple — the platform lets car owners book service appointments with verified third-party workshops, letting consumers save $$ on inflated pricing at dealer-workshop, while at the same time adding some transparency and flexibility to a rather unpleasant, opaque, and fragmented industry.
600+ service centers are onboard, across 35 cities, servicing 2 million+ cars to date. Fresh capital will go towards expanding into tier II and III cities.
Key insight — vehicle repair and maintenance is a $690 million market in India, but with spares, it's a $7 billion mammoth. Adding standardization and giving consumers more options could be a great opportunity to print some $$.
Quick look at the Tok’s move on Apps 👀
What happened — TikTok launched Jumps, a mini-app development and distribution feature, that will allow independent developers to build on top of the platform, allowing mini-apps to be directly integrated into videos.
We’re talking basic apps you see plaguing FB’s interface routinely — recipes, quizzes, vocabulary flashcards etc., and regular culprits Buzzfeed, Wikipedia, Quizlet etc. are already onboard.
Why it matters — TikTok makes TONS of money, but analysts maintain the app is still woefully under monetized, because showing ads without interrupting the users’ flow is nearly impossible. Transactional apps, games, etc. are supposed to help expand monetization while also opening up possibilities for commerce, shopping, and other features.
Bottomline — great setting for Bytedance to show meaningful $$ as it looks to IPO.
Closing out — Visa takes its revenge 💳
What happened — Payment network Visa acquired Sweden based fintech, Tink, in a $2.1 billion deal, in a bid to expand business beyond the core card network.
Imagine how you can link your bank account to a payment app? Tink basically works with banks to build that infra, which it then offers as a single API to developers, to be able to make connections and link accounts — making users’ banking and transactional information portable.
Why does it matter — Last year, Visa had tried buying out the market leader in open banking — Plaid, but that deal was blocked by regulators, with Plaid eventually walking away. A bruised Visa was looking for a comeback, and Tink is finally its pick. Tink has 250M users.
Big picture — Visa’s business is basically being threatened by the rise of digital wallets, which coupled with QR codes, are rendering “cards” useless. Owning the protocol that links users’ bank accounts with disparate fintech’s is one way to defend its eventual disruption.
What else we are snackin’ 🍿
⭐ Main star - global electronics giant Foxconn came back for round 2, joining 29 other companies to apply for GOI’s ₹12,000 crore+ telecom focused PLI scheme.
🐦 Integrations FTW - Twitter will now allow iOS users to share tweets directly on Insta stories. You’re legally okayed to delete those screenshots now.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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