Market summary: 📊
Markets continue to display irrational volatility. After several green-days, India pulled back sharply yesterday. US meanwhile recovered strongly after Fed guided for a 0.25% rate jump coming soon later in March.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.86%
Nasdaq - up 1.70%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.12%
Sensex - down 1.38%
What’s brewing hot ☕
💪 Strong trade — global markets continue to remain voracious consumers of Indian goods, a sign that the broad agenda of spurring local production with new policies might be working. For the month of Feb, total exports grew a solid 22% YoY — topping over $33 billion for the month. COVID rupturing supply chains have given Indian merchants a solid ground to play on. Strength of the local consumer is strong too BTW — we imported $55 billion worth of stuff for the month, up 39% YoY!
🤯 Mother of all funds — if you thought the local market was too hot, big VC houses have more fireworks coming. Accel India, one of the most reputed names in the business, raised a massive $650 million fund to keep writing ’em checks here and in Southeast Asia. The fund brings Accel India’s total AUM to $2 billion! Rumors are, Sequoia and Elevation are prepping for similar-sized raises.
Netflix is getting quite serious about gaming 🎮
What happened — Netflix made another gaming acquisition yesterday, buying out a mobile games developer called Next Games for $72 million — further sinking its teeth into the mobile and casual gaming arena.
Some context: as growth in its core business began to flatline post-COVID, Netflix had a challenging question to answer — what do we do next? Competition was catching up, and people flush with options were going elsewhere.
Reed Hastings picked gaming (vs. sports, or news) for its obviously rising popularity. Systemic barriers opening up on the horizon like 5G making game-streaming easy, AI advances making high-quality graphics better, make this pursuit all the more exciting.
So what does Next do: the Finland-based Next Games makes free-to-play mobile games, based on popular movies, comics and even shows like Netflix’s Stranger Things. It’s a public company, making ~$30 million in revenues a year, with 95% of that moolah coming from in-game purchases.
And there’s natural synergies already — first, Netflix now has a hook into the rapidly growing mobile gaming segment. Second, Netflix can get the Next-team to make more games based on its content-slate — spurring an in-house game-dev machine.
Bottomline — gaming is a ~$200 billion market, 2x the size of the global movie business. You can see why the streamers are tempted here so much!
Big balls seed raises in Venture City 💰
First up, a fintech-platform called Kuhoo offering student loans, raised a CHAD-sized $20 million seed round from WestBridge Capital.
Kuhoo is building a lending system ground up, using modern data-tactics to understand the earning potential of students and underwrite loans better than the banks can. It’s working with NBFCs and banks on the other end to get these loans funded. Details are still evasive, but we’re guessing an Upstart like model in the making perhaps?
Then looking at supply chain SaaS for a bit, ☝️
Prozo, a software enabled warehousing-as-a-service company, closed a $10 million Series A round from Sixth Sense Ventures and a few others.
Prozo runs its own warehouses and distribution networks — while allowing digital commerce companies to store and move products with them on a pay-per-use model. If you’re an upcoming venture or just testing out a new market, you get to bypass investing in massive facilities yourself, and instead just pay operational fees for temporary use of their shipping infra.
Prozo counts JioMart, Amazon, and even Flipkart among its customers.
Big picture — e-commerce is expected to be a $110 billion+ game in India by 2025. The infrastructure is miles away from being ready yet.
Enterprise software is kicking butt, confirms Salesforce 🔥
The largest cloud-software pure-play, Salesforce, reported its earnings last night — further underlining the strong tailwinds in cloud software, as global enterprises continue to spend on nimbler, gold-standard cloud-tools vs. self-built applications.
Quick look at some key numbers: 🧐
Revenue of $7.33 billion for the quarter, up 26% YoY
Subscription and support revenue grew 24.7% to $6.83 billion
Sales of Slack and CRM software Platform 360 jumped a whopping 53% YoY to $1.35 billion
FYI, Salesforce also owns Slack, which it had acquired in a record $26 billion deal last year. Management says Slack is on its way to be a $1.5 billion annual business by 2023!
Why care — when Marc Benioff speaks, global SaaS leaders listen. Guidance for strong growth to continue into 2022 reads well for everyone in the cloud game — in public and private markets.
Closing out — Apple does Russia dirty 🍎
Tim Cook walked out of his executive meeting-room yesterday deciding he’s cutting off Russia from using all of Apple’s products and services. Which means no iPhones sold anymore, no Apple Pay working, and no access to Russian apps outside the country.
Russia has about 97 million smartphone users. Android dominates the game like India, but about 25% of the base is on iPhones. Especially the upper middle class, the white-collars, and the oligarch-kids. The pinch will be hard to fathom. ✌️
Bunch of other companies have joined the roster of bans too: 📋
Disney, Paramount, are stopping movie releases in Russia
Google and Facebook blocked Russian news companies from distributing content on their platform. Dish TV cut off a Russian news channel
Consumer plays like Nike are shutting online stores because there’s no guarantee they can deliver products
Meanwhile, Uber is selling its $800 million stake in Russian ride-hailer Yandex
And on the good side, Airbnb is offering 100K refugees from Ukraine housing
Bottom line — seems like vanity posturing right now, but when the base is pissed, the leaders will have to listen. Plain and simple. 👋
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🙌 Getting there - India’s manufacturing index rose to 54.9 in February, recovering from a 4-month low in January. Local production is brushing off Omicron!
🤦 Thank you Putin - Petrol & Diesel prices are set to soar next week as crude price shoots up over $110 per barrel.
🍀 Green win - credit to new-policies and the enthusiasm of local conglomerates, India added 10 GW of solar capacity in 2021, a 212% jump from 2020!
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
You can forward this email or share FC on social media by clicking the button below. Thanks and Ciao! 😀