Snacking goes up in India 📈
WFH drives laptop sales, Tesla's got competition, and smartphone sales plummet.
Hi 👋, Tanvi here.
Filter Coffee is a newsletter that hits your inbox every morning with notable tech and business news scoops to jump start your day. Sign up below for free 👇
Let’s go ahead and get started:
Stock market summary: 🥴
US - S&P 500 down 0.53% 🔽
India - Sensex up 0.86% 🔼
Winners of Pandemic? Snacking companies 😋
Parle Products Pvt. Ltd. saw a surge in demand during the pandemic and expanded its market share by 5% between March and May as home locked consumers couldn’t keep their hands off the snack cabinet.
The company believes that in addition to people stuck at home hoarding up on food, several relief efforts across the nation including migrants on the move who relied on value packs to sustain during the journey added to the spike in volume.
Management advised that the trend may not be sustainable through rest of the year.
Similarly, Parle’s rival Britannia Industries had sold considerably more packs of biscuits in April and May, with a 20% and 28% growth in sales respectively.
Smartphone sales plummet 📉
India will sell over 127 Million smartphones this year as compared to 167 Million units last year. This is a 21.6% decrease from the sales forecast that analysts had been expecting at the beginning of the year.
The decrease is largely caused by the lockdown and follow on grim economic conditions which affected the supply and demand.
The brunt of the situation will be borne by the small brands and small vendors who sold these phones. For brands as well as merchants like these the only way to sustain revenue is to diversify into essential electronics, safety electronics, etc. to suit the needs of the current business environment.
Owing to the uncertainties around the pandemic, people would want to spend less cash and save as much as possible which will inevitably push their non-essential purchases further out.
Remote work drives HP sales 🖥️
As people look towards a new future of working from home, they are out upgrading their devices. And as a result dead beat brands like HP are seeing a surge in their consumer PC business, all thanks to the pandemic.
In the beginning when the lockdown was imposed, electronics companies actually saw a major plunge in supply and demand as most offline sales were paused and many of these brands didn’t have smooth online operations yet in India.
According to research firm IDC, the PC market in India declined by 16.7% year over year in the March quarter of 2020 to 1.8 Million units.
But ever since the reopening started, growth has started to come back as enterprises and consumers are clearing out shelves across the nation to continue operations in the way that the new normal permits. In the most recent quarter, HP led the market with 28.2% share as Dell Technologies and Lenovo stood at 25.9% and 20% respectively.
Watch out Elon 👀
Musk may have some fresh competition in the EV market.
Nikola, a company which makes battery powered electric trucks and recently went public is the new darling of Wall Street. Nikola had also completed a merger with a company named VectorIQ on 3rd June and since then its shares have been up 120%.
Unlike Tesla which currently focuses exclusively on consumer cars, this company makes full electric and zero emission semi trucks.
It is worth $26 Billion based on Mondays closing price. This makes Nikola more valuable than Ford and Fiat Chrysler, two of the largest automakers in the world. Investors and analysts are skeptical of the move as Nikola barely has any revenue or profits to justify its valuation.
Tweet of the day:
The economy is tanking, but the markets are soaring. Investors believe the faux growth in stock market returns while global economic growth outlook worsens and major parts of the economy are still reeling from lock-downs will be short lived.
However, on the other hand we have seen unprecedented levels of interventions from governments across the world to salvage the economy. The US has infused trillions, India announced a $300 Billion stimulus deal, many other nations are doing the same. As borrowing money becomes easy, and the cost of doing business goes down, are stock market prices really justified then?
Everyone is baffled. Humanity is clearly treading in uncharted waters here.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
👏 Number of recoveries exceeds the number of active cases - amidst all the gloom there may be some good news. Unlike any other country that has been a hotbed for the pandemic, India is actually seeing more people recover from the virus than current active cases. This unique balance is giving citizens hope. This could be because we were hit by the worst quite late and were well prepared with a plan to respond to the crisis.
😷 Wearing face masks could prevent a second wave of infection - while the WHO backtracks on his claims, an independent study by scientists in the UK have claimed that masks are essential to prevent another wave of infections globally. We have no clue who is right, but we gotta do our part. Wear that mask.
🍎 Apple staff to return to headquarters on June 15 - the smartphone giant is ready to welcome part of its staff at its Cupertino, California headquarters starting June 15. The new order of business will allow flexibility with work from home, but Apple’s secretive nature of work means people will have to report to the HQ more often than other companies.
🎤 Voice assistant to help people with grocery shopping: Flipkart - taking cues from its global competitors, the Indian e-commerce giant is bringing a voice assistant to its shopping experience. Assistants are expected to be the next frontier of consumer technology, leveraging AI to understand our intentions, improve recommendations, and auto fulfill our orders. Exciting times.
Hope you took a thing or two away from today’s edition. 😀
If you like it, show us some love by clicking the heart icon below. And don’t forget to invite your friends.