Short video wars 📈
Disney's recovery, inflation problems, and Forbes got a new investor.
Market summary: 📊
India added some more on Thursday taking confidence from RBI’s guidance on monetary policy. US continues to bounce all over the place — now finishing in the red, giving up most weekly gains.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.81%
Nasdaq - down 2.33%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.81%
Sensex - up 0.79%
Quick shot of Espresso ☕
📈 Won’t stop swelling — US inflation for the month of January broke more records to top 7.5% — a 40 year high, beating market estimates of 7.2%. Pressure on central bank to cut back liquidity in the market hasn’t been heavier, which could mean dry days ahead for the stock market. Meanwhile, India’s central bank is cool as a cucumber — guiding for 4.5% average inflation through this year, significantly lower than what the analysts were calling for.
Short video apps are joining hands 🤙
What happened — Sharechat is rumored to be buying out short-video platform MX TakaTak in a $600-$700 million cash + stock deal, set to be signed off by the end of this month. SC will group TakaTak with its own TikTok-clone, Moj.
That’s the first mega exit in the short-video races that began just over 2 years ago when TikTok was banned in India. TakaTak, with a focus on vernacular content and Bharath-audience, scaled to about 120 million or so users, with about 70-80 million monthly actives. Not bad for such a short time frame!
Sharechat’s Moj meanwhile has been at the forefront of the races — raising hundreds of millions, and reaching up to 165 million+ monthly active users says TechCrunch. Combined the duo could reach a base of 200-250 million unique people, if there ins’t much overlap in their base.
Anyway, the deal leaves 2 other formidable rivals in foray — Josh and Roposo. Not to mention Meta’s Reels and YouTube’s Short as well.
Big picture — impressions and time spent is quickly gravitating towards short-video across social platforms. Zuckerberg just asked Meta teams to focus on milking Reels. YouTube is following too. Not unimaginable to think of more consolidation and takeouts coming in the space near term.
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Quick updates from Venture Land 💰
What happened — xto10x Technologies, a new venture by ex-Flipkart founder Binny Bansal, closed a $25 million Series A from Binny Bansal himself. Few other founders, operators, angels pitched in too.
xto10x is building a platform that combines a host of tools useful during the blitz scaling phase of any growth company. For example, they’re currently working on an employee NPS tool which basically makes it easy for staff to give leadership feedback on how their work life looks. 70+ enterprise customers are onboard.
Down the line, xto10x will build products helping marketing, growth, product, and other functions.
Meanwhile, tiger won’t stop hunting 🐯
Tiger Global is now courting car service platform GoMechanic to lead a $80 million Series D round — bumping valuation by 3x to $1.2 billion. 6-year-old GoMechanic offers pick and drop car repair services via its network of 900 workshops across the country. 2 million+ cars have been serviced till now, with revenues topping $50 million!
Disney reminding us why it's a generational company 🔥
When COVID came knocking, Disney’s business was one of the worst hit. Theme Parks were shut. Cruises stopped sailing. Netflix and streaming was chipping away at the cable TV empire. Sports broadcasting was halted too.
In the following months, the company somehow navigated the impossible waters to finally rise back up during the last quarter of 2021 firing on all cylinders, smashing market’s expectations!
Quick look at the key numbers in Q4:
Total revenues of $21.82 billion, grew 34% YoY
Revenue from Theme Parks and Experiences segment more than 2x’ed to $7.2 billion
Disney+ killed it too — now reporting 129.8 million paid subscribers in total, growing 10% compared to the quarter before
Across all its subscription products (which includes HULU, Disney+, other platforms in regional markets, and ESPN+), Disney now has close to 196 million paid subscribers! Still got a long way to monetize subs like Netflix does, but remarkable progress nonetheless.
Markets rewarded the company by taking stock up 7% yesterday!
Closing out — Forbes strikes deal with crypto man 😎
What’s poppin’ — the CEO of the crypto exchange Binance, who is also the world’s richest crypto billionaire, is buying a sizable stake in Forbes for $200 million!
Forbes was actually preparing to go public via a SPAC deal, for which it had to muster about $400 million from institutional investors. Binance dialed-in and made an offer to swap out half of those investors with a $200 million check all by itself.
Hard to pin their motivations, but Binance had frequently been subject to enhanced media scrutiny in the recent times as regulators were sniffing around for wrongdoings. Tight relationship with a popular media outlet can be a great way of balancing PR! Or, Forbes starts a crypto publication?
Worth mentioning — when political heat was rising on Bezos, he had purchased the Washington Post. Billionaire obsession with mainstream media isn’t all that new.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
📉 Changing plans - ET says Oyo may be forced to go conservative and reduce the size of its IPO to under a billion, as poor market conditions persist.
📺 New streamer in town - Airtel is combining content from 15 OTTs to launch its new streaming service called Xstream Premium. Will cost ₹149 a month.
💼 Jobs available - India’s active white collar job openings touched 325K in January, the highest in the last 2 years. Entrepreneurship much?
😒 Been there - a million dollar painting was ruined after a bored security guard drew eyes on the faceless personas in them.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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