What’s the size?
Airtel catches up, China hittin' where it hurts, and never ending Future fiasco.
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Market summary: 📊
The bottomless spiral continued, with Indian stocks landing lower by a percent and more on average. US followed the sentiment, with tech particularly given yet another heavy beating.
US:
S&P 500 - down 1.48%
Nasdaq 100 - down 3.13%
India:
Nifty 50 - down 1.11%
Sensex - down 1.17%
Friday shot of espresso ☕
✅ Jio won’t have it easy—despite its debt-load and a relatively weaker operating position, Airtel’s showing brilliant resilience against Jio, adding 5.9 million subscribers in the month of January compared to the latter’s 1.9 million. That’s a 6 month streak in Airtel’s favor now, as Jio’s freebies dry up, and pricing slowly increases, and consumers minus any incentives and likely crowding of the network which is weighing on data speeds, are opting for change. It’s baffling. In the last 6 months, Airtel added 25 million new subscribers, while Jio pulled in some 15 million. Airtel stock was up a couple points on the news.
✅ Ring the girl squad—Robinhood made a big hire to clean up its festering mess and groom up for the looming IPO, hiring one of the top rainmakers at Google, Aparna Chennapragada, as Robinhood’s first Chief Product Officer. Aparna went through IIT Madras, earned an MS from UT Austin, spent 10 years at Akamai before she got another masters at MIT, and since then has been leading product efforts at Google Search and YouTube. Although RH’s been growing 2-3 million users a month since the $GME fiasco, the IPO could set the company up for a rough date with retail investors, and when its crisis time, boy can you count on women...
There’s billions in sizing you up 👻
6 ft., brown eyes—Snapchat made a tiny yet super interesting acquisition, buying out Fit Analytics, a startup that uses fancy computer vision AI to help ecommerce companies accurately capture customers’ clothing sizes.
As social commerce picks pace, platforms are beefing up tech to make the value proposition indisputable for brands, using all the sexy tech they can find to close the gap between ad targeting and purchase decisions, driving ROI. And Snapchat has been super innovative in this game so far.
All about the dolla—processing returns is one of the most annoying problems associated with online shopping, which ends up costing brands and logistics companies tens of billions of dollars each year. A “size-identity” that precisely maps your body in 3D, and then allows you to portably carry that information from one ecommerce service to another, kinda like your email, or “auto-fill” in chrome could really be a life saver. Scan your body once, use it everywhere.
The possibilities to innovate here are endless, and Snapchat’s aggressiveness with such ambitious tech is exactly why the stock has been rewarded 7x or so in the past year alone.
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Hit where the real power lieth 🔨
What’s happening—China, very much dedicated to make an example out of Jack Ma’s outspoken a**, is attacking his media empire, with regulators actively seeking to divest ownership of media outlets that Ma controls or has invested in.
Billionaires love their media—it's quite common for billionaires, especially those with strong opinions and political interests, to often allocate a few $$ into controlling media mouthpieces. Bezos for example owns The Washington Post. Marc Benioff has Time Magazine. Warren Buffet, 30+ newspapers!
Similarly, Ma owns the South China Morning Post, tech news site 36kr (via one of his companies), and has interest in the state owned Shanghai Media Group. Alibaba will now be ordered to divest its share in many of these and other smaller media companies.
What matters: if you have control over the media, you have control over public opinion, and taking Ma off of these companies indicates that the real Chinese assault on the man is probably yet to come, and the state is essentially ensuring no loose ends remain that give him any kinda power to fight back.
BTW, if one of you cool billionaires on our reader list got your checkbook on you, give us a call maybe?
Amazon investing in Indian D2C brands 🧐
When Amazon sees a hot trend on the horizon, it has a notorious reputation for copying market leaders and rolling out its own generic product line. But GOI’s check on e-commerce companies means those shenanigans can’t work in India. Alternative? Take out that fat checkbook….
The company just led a $25 million series C round in direct to consumer cosmetics brand MyGlamm, investing alongside Ascent Capital, and Wipro, valuing the business at over $100 million.
Myglamm basically operates on an omnichannel model, selling a portfolio of 600+ products via 10,000 offline locations across 70 cities in India, in addition to a vibrant ecommerce platform as well as selling on marketplaces like Amazon, obviously.
The company also runs a women focused digital platform, and an influencer marketing platform, both of which form the core of its marketing machine. This year, the business is on track to post over ₹600 crores in revenues. Fresh funds will go towards R&D, product dev, and more offline expansion.
Bottomline: cosmetics market is expected to top $6 billion in 2021 in India, and barely a fraction of it is digital. The rise of homegrown platforms like Plum, Nykaa, Purplle, Sugar, combined with Amazon’s move here, underlines how attractive the long term opportunity really is.
Quick look at venture street 💰
Pixxel, one of the hottest space tech startups at the moment in India closed on a $7.3 million seed round from Techstars, Omnivore, Lightspeed Ventures, and a few others.
What do they exactly do—the company puts satellites into the Lower Earth Orbit and then captures hyperspectral images of the earth’s surface, which basically means images that capture a wide array of light vs. just red, blue, and green you’d find in standard 2D pictures.
The high-resolution images can then be utilized to capture signals on water & air pollution, crop diseases, and gas leaks, aiding environment, agriculture, and energy industries in combating a range of issues. There’s plenty of companies playing this game, but in Pixxel, Indian enterprises find a low-cost, homegrown and secure alternative.
The company’s impending launch for its first sat in Feb had to be pushed by a couple months due to some software glitches, but the entire private space industry is eagerly looking forward to this lift off, which will continue to draw eyeballs to India’s nascent yet distinctly promising space industry.
Closing out—Future’s future uncertain 🛒
We can’t wait for this drama to get over as much as you, but the Delhi Court voted in favor of Amazon yesterday, upholding the verdict of the emerging arbitration court that asked Future to not move forward with its integration with Reliance.
The court slapped the already broke-ass Future Group with a ₹20 lakh fine, and demanded Biyani show up in court for the next hearing. Meanwhile, writing about this for the 768th time…
What else are we snackin’ 🍿
🙄 Nothing’s free around here - it's time to monetize all that engagement, and Tik Tok will no longer let people opt out of personalized ads like it has historically done. Analysts have always been concerned about TikTok’s ability to monetize without breaking the flow of short video consumption and hurting engagement, and this update will be an interesting one to follow.
💰 Billion here, billion there - Jefferies, quite a reputed investment management and research firm, is valuing Reliance Retail at $100 billion in a note sent last night to clients, slapping a premium on RIL’s digital prowess. That’d make the company one of the most valued retail-first brands in India, and even globally. Sounds cool, but how does one factor in the uncertainty of Future’s biznis?
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