Market summary: 📊
Investors looked at the budget favorably, taking major indices up a notch. US markets finished in the green too — as big tech earnings give hope.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.64%
Nasdaq - up 0.65%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.37%
Sensex - up 1.46%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
🤔 Everyone wants a new job — Americans continue to abandon their pre-pandemic jobs, for better pay or flexibility, or to mine crypto and dance on the Tok. After a record 4.5 million people had quit in November, another 4.3 million turned the badge in for December. Corporate job openings meanwhile shot up nearly 50% from 2019 levels — to 11 million by the end of 2021. Fyi, the US has a ~165 million-odd workforce.
👎 Maruti struggles too — semiconductor shortages continue to gut-punch India’s auto industry. Fresh data indicates Maruti saw total car unit sales drop 4% for the month of January 2022 — to about 1.54 lakh units. Low-budget vehicles saw the worst drop, down 18% over the year. Overall, the auto industry is expected to keep languishing through most of 2022 before these problems end.
Taxman comes for them crypto gainzzz 🙃
It’s been impossible to dodge budget-chatter on social! In all, GOI laid out a progressive agenda — fiscally conservative as expected, working to seed organic growth vs. one-time handouts, and prioritizing tech adoption.
Quick look at some key highlights that stood out to us: 🧐
On infra spending: Capital expenditures expanded by 35%+, to ₹7.5 lakh crores — this is basically money spent on bridges, and roads, and rail, and other mega infrastructure projects which catalyzes economic activity downstream. States will also receive up to ₹1 lakh crores for their capex needs.
On banking: Major banks will be asked to set up and tune dedicated digital operations in 75+ districts — seeding wider adoption at the rural level. Meanwhile, India’s Postal service is diving into financial services — all 1.5 lakh post-offices will be linked with banks to enable online fund transfer and other services at the PO center.
For mass upskilling: GOI will be kicking off a new portal for comprehensive digital upskilling — called DESH stack.
For telecom: 5G spectrum actions will be done in 2022. Critical for India to make sure it sustains all the digital bandwidth explosion.
On boosting production: host of concessions were outlined on imports — including on certain electronic parts & items to make sure companies kicking off India manufacturing under major PLI schemes don’t feel the pinch
On taxation: most sweeping change brought was to tax all crypto and other digital-asset earnings at a 30% flat rate. Bit expensive? Sure. For now, grateful we didn’t hear the word ‘ban’ anywhere!
There’s more blockchain: RBI will be launching a blockchain-backed Digital Rupee next year. Hard to imagine what role Blockchain plays here, but we’d give regulators a chance considering the exemplary success of infra projects like UPI.
On startups: Tax benefits extended to growth ventures. Earlier announced redemption of taxes for 3 consecutive years will now be extended for another year.
On clean transportation: 400 new energy efficient trains to be launched over the next 3 years.
There’s a host of other moves announced — from PLI schemes to accelerate production of solar modules, to the launch of e-passports, and a national tele-health service focusing on mental health to deal with post-COVID blowback. Here’s a pretty neat summary from the kind folks at ET!
Bottomline — its moot to debate the effectiveness of the moves. We’d defer to the markets to judge — and the Sensex finishing up 1.5% for the day seems like a decent verdict of approval.
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What’s poppin’ on Venture Street? 💰
Edtech-platform Scaler Academy closed a $55 million Series B round from Lightrock India, Sequoia and Tiger Global, with a 6x bump to valuation to over $700 million!
Scaler runs short cohort-based upskilling programs for working tech professionals and students — letting people master skills around computer science, data science, machine learning, to enable a quick career-change and a paycheck upgrade.
15,000+ people have been serviced by Scaler so far, and fresh funds will be put to fuel expansion in the US.
Meanwhile, Indian SaaS keeps pulling fat checks☝️
Chargebee, which had become a unicorn recently, raised another mammoth $250 million round from Sequoia & Tiger Global — at a $3.5 billion valuation.
Chargebee’s SaaS suite simplifies billing and collection of payments, as well as related operations like invoicing for business with recurring revenues. It’s a widely used product across the world, with revenues apparently doubling in the last 12 months — which we’re guessing top $150 million+ easily!
It’s a fist-fight to buy hot Gaming companies 🔥
Sony couldn’t let Microsoft buy Activision Blizzard without making a move to secure its PlayStation ecosystem. Last night, the gaming giant announced a $3.6 billion acquisition of Bungie — the creator of popular games Destiny and Halo.
It’s latin to non-gamers, but Bungie’s gaming universe is incredibly popular, played by tens of millions active players, routinely starring in PlayStation and Xbox top games charts. Sony obviously gets to strengthen its creative with the acquisition, and secure its seatbelts as the gaming world dives into a new era — where social, Metaverse, AR, VR, dictate the future.
Fyi, barely a month into 2022, and we’ve so far seen:
Zynga get acquired by Take-Two for $12.7 billion
Activision purchased by Microsoft for $69 billion
Sony go for Bungie at $3.6 billion
Big picture — close to $200 billion will be spent by consumers on games this year — across mobile, console, and PCs. That’s more than 2x the money spent on movies!
Meanwhile, how could the New York Times not make a move lol?
Wordle, the rapidly growing word game launched recently, has been purchased by the New York Times (the OG king of the cross-word puzzle) for $7-$8 million. Created by a former Reddit engineer, Wordle jumped to over a million daily active users within just 5 months! Sweet side-hustle payout!
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🚗 Broken AI - Tesla is recalling nearly 54,000 vehicles due to a bug in its full self-driving feature, which allows cars to pass stop signs without actually stopping.
💁♀️ Stupid features - Meta rolls out 3D-avatars to Instagram Stories and direct messages. Is this the Metaverse I was promised?
🌎 Global plans - HBO Max is expanding into 15 new countries, following a Disney and Netflix playbook of global expansion. Love the content, shitty app tho.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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