Stripped of jewels 👎
Amazon's new agenda, venture raises, and US stocks come to India.
Market summary: 📊
India pulled back another notch on Thursday, as folks digested US fed-rate hike commentary. US continued its relentless flogging of growth stocks for yet another day.
US:
S&P 500 - down 0.53%
Nasdaq - down 1.56%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 0.65%
Sensex - down 0.66%
What’s brewing hot ☕
🚣♀️ Vodafone keeps rowing — telco ain’t an easy game and cash is the need of the hour. Vodafone is now planning on raising another ₹4,500 crores by issuing some more stock to its promoters, the Vodafone Inc. group and folks from the Aditya Birla camp. Both groups have decided to buy the stake at a 20% premium to the market price. Not bad! Should further help clean up that balance sheet and prepare for 5G assault.
🛒 Amazon learns a lesson — the king of ecommerce is eating dust in offline retail, who would’ve thought. Management has decided to close all 68 small offline-stores Amazon used to run, selling books and electronics products, in the US and UK. Instead, a new strategy is being prepared to open new, larger stores focused on clothing and accessories, coupled with the current Whole Foods grocery locations. Stark deviation from how Bezos thought about the business, to how new boss Andy Jassy sees it now.
RIL jumps into electronics manufacturing 👨🔧
Deal-making season at camp-Ambani won’t end. Reliance signed another $221 million deal last night with silicon-valley based semiconductor player, Sanmina, to set up a joint venture in India and kick off electronics manufacturing and assembly.
Fertile ground: a host of Indian conglomerates are leveraging the global boom in semi-consumption, coupled with attractive policy incentives in India, to make a pivot to some kind of a semi-related services or production play. Recently we’ve seen even Vedanta get serious here, so no reason Reliance wouldn’t want to dabble too.
Anyway, Sanmina is the world’s 6th largest electronics manufacturing services company — basically a business that manufactures and assembles high-tech electronics hardware-products for clients across telecom, EVs, automotive, and healthcare across 20 countries. It’s a public company with revenues of ~$6 billion.
What’s the deal: both RIL and Sanmina will kick off manufacturing products locally —making equipment for 5G base stations, data centers, aerospace and cloud infra needs, currently mostly out of Sanmina’s Chennai location, with an expansion to follow.
Worth mentioning — Sanmina has supplied electronic components for homegrown EV-scooter makers like Ather Energy. You can sense the possibilities.
Fireworks continue in India’s Venture Town 💰
PocketFM, which is building a vernacular audio-content app, closed a massive $65 million round from Goodwater Capital, Tanger, and a few others.
Pocket FM is basically a Spotify + Audible combined into one — grouping everything from podcasts, to books, to long stories, except music. The content is available in over 8 languages, and some 50 million+ users tune in each month, adding up to 3 billion+ minutes streamed on the app monthly.
Majority of the base comes from heartland India, and new capital raised will go towards improving tech and pushing growth.
Then switching over to edtech for a bit, 📚
Filo, a 24x7 online tutoring venture, raised $23 million Series A from Anthos Capital and a bunch of existing investors.
Filo allows students to ask questions on their platform at any hour of the day, and instantly connects them with teachers — ideally in under 60 seconds. The company has been in business for 2 years, and serves over 1.5 million with a pool of 40K tutors. Quite impressive!
Chelsea Football Club is up for sale ⚽
What’s poppin’ — Russian Oligarch, Roman Abramovich, is forced to sell the crown-jewel of his empire, the England-based Chelsea Football Club — after sanctions make it hard for the billionaires to do business with the rest of the world.
Even if you don’t follow soccer, odds are you’re tight with a friend who does. Estimates suggest Chelsea has a 135 million+ fan base worldwide, and Forbes puts the club’s value at $3.2 billion.
Roman bought the club in 2003 for about $233 million — so he’s gotten his money’s worth, but the fact that he plans on forgiving over $1.5 billion in loans Chelsea owes him should tell you about his desperation in running for the door.
Silver lining: Roman says all $$ from the sale will go to fund Ukrainian charity efforts.
Russian billionaires are hurting across the board though: ☹️
$600 million super yacht of another oligarch, Alisher Usmanov, was seized by Germany
Another super boat belonging to Igor Sechin was seized by the French
Rest of them have moved their boats to Maldives, where the US or other western countries don’t have an extradition treaty
From real estate to venture-capital investments, Biden’s sanctions are coming for everything — and $$ has begun exchanging hands at rapid pace. Turns out, a lot it is moving into Bitcoin, which is driving crypto’s recent rally.
Closing out — NSE kicks off trading of US stocks ✌️
Indians are voracious consumers of American products, so naturally there’s been a lot of interest locally to invest in giants from Amazon to Google to P&G. SEBI and the National Stock Exchange cooked a plan last August to make it happen.
And yesterday, trading finally kicked off, facilitated by NSE’s International Exchange — which was set up in 2016 to basically bring foreign investors to trade in India.
How does it all work: in layman’s words, the guys at NSE International Exchange have set things up such that whenever you buy a US stock in India, their partners actually make a trade in the US, and issue something called a depositary receipt to you — which is legally showing you, the holder, as the owner of stock. You save $$ on forex fees, painful transfers, wire-charges, and what not. Plain and simple!
The system is still nascent, but hopefully in a few months things will get buzzing as volumes build up.
How do I buy: odds are, your favorite discount broker is currently working on getting the tech ready. Here’s a list of the brokers NSE has currently greenlit though.
Closing thoughts — currently, the system will kick off with 8 mega companies, including Google, Amazon, Netflix, and about 50 more will be added soon.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🤷 Can we just talk it out? - Amazon and Future are coming close to talking out a resolution, instead of wasting time in the court as the legal battle keeps dragging, costing millions.
🍎 Get ready - Apple will hold its annual spring event on March 8, where it is expected to showcase the new 5G iPhone SE, Mac Mini and iPad Air.
🔋 Cleaning shop - the MD of Eveready batteries has now resigned after the Dabur-Burmans made an open buyout offer.
🚨 SOS incoming - India is apparently considering putting together a financial package for exporters hurt by trade with Ukraine collapsing.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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