Snapdeal's trying 🤷♀️
Zuck gotta drop Giphy, GoFashion's killer open, and Zomato's new platform.
Market summary: 📊
Markets continue to display extreme volatility. India pulled back a notch on Tuesday, while the US beat up tech brutally for no reason.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.34%
Nasdaq - down 1.61%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.41%
Sensex - down 0.34%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
1️⃣ Killer debut — that’s how you do it! GoFashion, the maker of women’s athletic and bottom wear, blew the doors off at open, ending the day at a solid 90% premium to its IPO price. A profitable model, fragmented competition, an expanding consumer class, and reasonable IPO pricing — it had all the ingredients of an ideal listing. Meanwhile, first day bids for Star Health, the country’s largest private health insurer, saw a meh response, with only 12% total subscriptions. 2 more days to go!
2️⃣ No-go to Zuck — barely a day after making its mood felt widely, the UK competition regulators unequivocally asked Facebook to sell Giphy, which FB had recently acquired. The UK is concerned about Facebook’s rising control of chat tools, and that FB may eventually stop sharing GIFs with Snapchat, TikTok, and other smaller UK publishers and advertisers. FB will appeal, but there are multiple other investigations into the company, so risking antagonizing the regulators further may not be worth it.
With everyone still digesting the Twitter change, not much of a business news day. Let’s run through a few nuggets real quick. 🤙
Snapdeal is dreaming of a listing 🛒
What happened — grand-daddy of Indian ecommerce, Snapdeal, is cleaning house to raise $250 million from the public market, at a ~$1.5 billion valuation — apparently targeting an early-2022 listing.
The 11-year old business, remnant of India’s internet 1.0 wave, has had quite the roller coaster ride — from fighting an expensive market-share war with Amazon and Flipkart, to nearly imploding after a failed merger with Flipkart.
Business has since picked up though, with COVID’s tailwind to e-commerce helping, but high-expenses have stubbornly followed. Last known, the business made some ₹815 crores for the COVID year, losing ~₹200 crores net-net.
Bottomline — gonna be a tough sell with the market, and the low-$1.5 billion valuation speaks for that, but… still got a couple solid months to figure out some magic.
Hottest from Venture Street 💰
Edtekkk platform Adda247, which offers online-prep for govt-job exams, closed a $20 million Series B round from WestBridge Capital and Info Edge.
The platform offers prep-content for national exams like UPSC, as well as regional govt. job tutorials in local languages — focusing on a mostly non-metro base. 15 million people frequent the platform each month.
Fresh funds will go towards improving tech and hiring, of course.
Meanwhile, western VC’s come for gold in India ☝️
One of the US’ top SaaS and Internet investors, Bessemer Ventures, raised a $220 million dedicated India fund — it’s first for the region ever.
Bessemer started investing in India some 15 years ago, mainly from its core fund in SF, with stakes in leaders like PharmEasy, Swiggy, and Unacademy. This is now an effort to double down, especially at the early stage.
Economic machine humming alright 📈
What’s poppin’ — official data indicates that India’s GDP grew a strong 8.4% YoY for the 2nd quarter (July to September) of this year — on the back of solid recovery, and of course healthy pre-festive spending.
Analysts across the board were expecting an ~8-9% growth, but mostly on the lower end, so the reported numbers are well within that range — despite supply chain problems, and other issues making things tricky. No surprises.
FYI, for the quarter before this, the economy had grown a solid 20.4% — so you can sense a sustaining momentum in recovery.
Also worth mentioning, for the month of October, core industries in India (coal, natural gas, refinery products, fertilizers, steel, cement and electricity) generated 7.5% YoY growth in output — another proxy for strength.
Bottomline — markets gotta take some comfort from these numbers. Not everything’s hollow.
Closing Out — Zomato’s new platform 🤝
What’s poppin’ — Zomato is launching a fundraising platform that will connect emerging food ventures with potential big-money investors — allowing scalable restaurants-chains to find $$ for expansion.
Stats suggest barely 25-or-so restaurant/food-ventures/cloud-kitchens (ventures with a reasonably scalable model) have raised a Series A or latter rounds. Zomato wants to fix that. Beyond matchmaking, Zomato will also apparently help founders get their “story” right, filling in for bandwidth that founders often may-not have.
Big picture — delivery is one aspect of Zomato’s business. Meanwhile, restaurants continue to demand more technology, and offering anything and everything to make their ops easier, including access to capital, is a great way to thicken relationships.
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
💰 Nadela liquidating - Satya sold almost 50% of his stock in Microsoft, worth almost $300 million. Feeling the top?
💉 What can we do - Bharat Biotech has opened a study to understand if the Covaxin shot works against Omicron.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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