Spend that cash 💸
More Unicorns, INFY's latest bet, and India's export win.
Market summary: 📊
India continues to shed gains after last week’s crazy run up. US pulled back quite a bit too, as rising cyber attack incidents spook the markets.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.23%
Nasdaq - down 1.41%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.40%
Sensex - down 0.53%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
📉 Kaise dooba — the Bombay Stock Exchange has issued a notification to PayTM to explain why its stock price has crumbled so much in such a short period of time. Not very usual for the exchange to do this, but then you don’t see close to several billions vaporize in the public markets in the matter of weeks either. PayTM is now trading down almost 75% from its IPO price of ₹2,150 to a basic ₹550.
👍 New normal — possibility of a Russian retaliation (digitally) has businesses and government organizations in the US and its friendly nations running scared. Okta came out this morning and clarified that out of 15K or so of its customers, the recent Lapsus$ hack affected about 366 customers. Stock was hammered down 10%. Meanwhile Italy says its state run railway company just detected a breach, affecting scheduling and payments. Welcome to the new normal, and best wishes if you’re a security consultant!
Berkshire finally put that cash to work 💸
Meta, Google, Starbucks, or perhaps a futuristic SaaS name? Maybe cybersecurity. Jack Dorsey’s Square? Folks were holding out for Uncle Warren to put that $150 billion cash pot Berkshire had amassed through the pandemic to use somewhere cool.
But Warren, so typical, went with the most boring business he could pick, buying out century old insurance company Alleghany for $11.6 billion — making it BRK’s 2nd biggest acquisition ever.
New York-based Alleghany was founded way back in 1929 as a railroad financing and holding venture, before it pivot solely to insurance. The runs a hodge-podge of subsidiaries which sell various types of insurance products — including wholesale specialty, property and casualty, you name it.
To remind ya GenZs, although Warren holds giants like Apple or NuBank in his basket, insurance is the largest contributor to Berkshire’s income — with 27% of the company’s revenues coming this segment. Alleghany’s acquisition will further diversify and solidify that cash cow.
Worth mentioning — even after the deal, Berkshire will still find itself on a $146 billion cash pot. Invaluable as the markets stays cold through 2022.
OfBusiness spins out another unicorn 🦄
What happened — Oxyzo, the lending arm of B2B commerce-platform OfBusiness (which is already a unicorn itself BTW) closed a huge $200 million Series A from Alpha Wave Global, Tiger Global and a few others, at a $1 billion valuation.
That would be the largest Series A by an Indian venture to date, and 2022’s 13th unicorn.
OfBusiness, which basically runs a marketplace for SMEs to procure raw materials, kicked off Oxyzo in 2016 as its subsidiary to offer SMEs on its platform working capital financing, and build an additional revenue stream.
Over time, the business branched out to serve outside customers as well, having processed more than $2 billion in total loan volumes to date. Their loan book stands at about ~$350 million today, with 3,000+ customers.
Meanwhile, Yuga Labs is truly unstoppable 🔥
The company that made the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection raised a massive $450 million seed round — from big names like Andreessen Horowitz, at a $4 billion valuation!
Barely days ago Yuga had acquired Crypto Punks and Meebits, increasing the range of NFT projects in its kitty, all meant to help the startup build out its own metaverse experience called Otherside.
Quick look at INFY’s latest bet 🤙
What happened — IT king Infosys acquired a German digital marketing company, Oddity, for $50 million — looking to strengthen its digital creative chops.
One of the largest independent digital agencies in Germany, Oddity helps enterprises build immersive digital and augmented reality marketing campaigns (think fancy ads at large public squares, immersive creatives at the public bus stop, and such) with operations spanning Europe and China, serving clients like Disney and Mercedes.
Infosys will be merging them with Wongdoody — another award-winning US-based creative and marketing platform INFY owns (had acquired them back in 2018), with the combo seeking to serve clients in India and other emerging markets.
Closing out — Tesla will go head-to-head with German cars 🔌
What’s popping — Tesla finally inaugurated its massive factory yesterday in Berlin, Germany, as part of its plan to expand aggressively in Europe, and take on the BMWs, and the Mercs. Even the German Chancellor was present at the ribbon cutting ceremony.
The factory, called Giga Berlin, is capable of producing 500K cars a year, and will try to ramp up production to about 30K or so cars a month by August. Outside of Tesla’s OG location in Fremont California, this would be their biggest facility ever.
And it comes at the right time. Literally every other automaker, marred by supply chain problems and semi-issues is playing on the back foot. Tesla has a generational opportunity ahead of itself to capture share, and grow business into that trillion dollar valuation.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🙌 Making history - coming out of COVID, India made the most of the global trade dislocation to export a record $400 billion worth goods in FY22, up 37% from the previous year.
😌 Good Riddance - COVID containment measures will be removed across the country from March 31st as cases begin to slowly drop.
🗣️ All lies - after much hoopla, MDH is now denying reports of a potential sale to HUL. HUL investors weren’t too pleased with the deal news either.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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