Why Oracle!
Pharma deal galore, VC raises, and BCCI finds partner.
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Stock summary: 📊
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.23%
Nasdaq 100 - up 0.98%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.23%
Sensex - up 1.26%
Fighting out for online pharmacies 💊
Following in the footsteps of its competitors, Flipkart is apparently looking to launch its own digital pharmacy business as well riding the COVID induced shift away from offline to online. It's almost as if RIL, AMZN, and Flipkart share their notes with each other.
Reports suggest that the company is still in early stages of forming a strategy. While efforts to build an internal epharmacy team are underway, the company is also talking to startup PharmEasy for a potential partnership or may be an acquisition.
PharmEasy however is currently in the middle of finalizing its own talks to merge with Bengaluru-based rival Medlife, in a $1.2 billion deal.
Later in the day news broke out that Reliance finalized its move into the space by making a ₹620 crores investment into NetMeds for a 60% stake. Reliance will also get 100% control over NetMeds’ distribution, and health services subsidiaries.
In similar events,
Chemists across the nation on the other hand are taking on Amazon for trying to steal their lunch. After the company announced doorstep delivery of drugs in Bengaluru, around 8.5 lakh chemists under the banner of All India Organisation of Chemists and Druggists (AIOCD) issued warnings to the company, claiming e-pharmacies are illegal and not recognized by law under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act.
The body claims that government approval for sale of medicine online during the times of lockdowns will not extend to the post-COVID world. Good luck fellas.
We have a new decacorn 🦄
Millennial investors’ favorite and global no-fee investing flag bearer, Robinhood, raised another $200 million at a $11.2 billion valuation, adding to the $320 million and another $280 Million the company had raised on two separate occasions this year alone.
The new raise at a steeper valuation officially makes the company a decacorn and comes at a significant ~35% premium relative to the ~$8 odd billion valuation the company had just 4 months ago. 2020 has been a great year for the company as increased volatility in the markets, some benefit of generational wealth transfer at the end of a boom cycle, and stimulus checks from the government - all led to millennials flooding to invest with them.
Also, thank you Tesla stock for hitting $1,800. 😄
Obviously building out more products, better systems, and expanding to new markets will be a priority for the company.
Switching gears, let’s talk about some VCs who have raised to fund new Robinhoods -
Endiya Partners’ seed and early-stage Fund II has received an investment of ₹50 crore from the Nippon India Digital Innovation AIF Fund. Endiya said the partnership with Nippon would provide its portfolio of companies with financial and strategic support, resulting in increased access to growth opportunities and sustainable scalability. In other words, cash is king.
Endiya's current portfolio includes Darwinbox, Steradian Semiconductors, Kissht, SigTuple, and Myelin Foundry. And with the new fund the company will invest in 16-20 startups, with an initial cheque size of $500,000 to $1 million in seed/pre-series rounds, with flow on rounds of up to $5 million per company.
Next up, Lightspeed Venture Partners closed on a $275 million fund dedicated to India, its largest so far for the region. This marks LVP’s third regional fund and is a testament of their ambition for India. Firm management hopes it can invest in about 2 dozen domestic startups using the capital, with more support from Lightspeed global ops for follow-on rounds if things look promising.
Well, when you look at their star studded portfolio that includes bellwethers like Udaan, Sharechat, OkCredit, DarwinBox etc., there’s little doubt that we won’t see history repeat.
Dream 11 bags IPL title 🏏
After Vivo staged a walkout leaving BCCI hanging, India’s first gaming unicorn, Dream 11, swooped in to fill the shoes. The company bagged the IPL title sponsorship for Rs. 222 crore for 2020, for the games to be held in the UAE this year.
Although BCCI had planned on retaining Vivo despite widespread criticism, the company had taken on itself to walk away after the India China skirmish led to social media uproar by fans. A bunch of Indian companies had run up to grab the opportunity, including Ramdev’s Patanjali, the TATA group, Byju’s, Unacademy.
Dream 11 has a good history of making bold moves. After signing MS Dhoni in 2018 as a brand ambassador, they had quickly managed to double their user base in a year's time, bringing total users now to 75 million.
The title sponsorship will give them a lot more firepower by boosting visibility in front of hundreds of million viewers, likely cementing their leadership in the fantasy gaming segment. Read more.
Why Oracle, Why? 🤔
Software giant Oracle has been limping into the cloud era (avg. growth rate of -0.4% over the last 2 years), struggling to serve its clients as new age solutions continue to take jabs at it but for some reason undecodable to civilization, the database company thinks buying TikTok is the answer to its problems. Yep, the company is joining MSFT and rest of the pack in pitching Bytedance management for a potential sale.
Clearly, there is some direct influence from maverick founder Larry Ellison here. And the fact that Bytedance secretly (not so secretly either, but relatively unknown to common knowledge) owns a range of other business including cloud software, virtual education tools, online medical services, and in-vehicle infotainment - making it a well diversified tech company, which might have piqued Larry’s interest.
Apparently Oracle is in talks with US VCs who are current shareholders in TikTok to cobble up a deal, and per reports Oracle and Microsoft are far far ahead compared to other players as far as negotiations go.
Regardless, to think Oracle can pull off running a pioneering consumer tech business without little experience doing so in the past is a stretch by all measures. But if you know about Larry Ellison, you know not to bet against the man. Interesting twist! Read more.
Tweet of the day -
What else are we snackin‘ 🍿
🏎️ Musk races to 4th position - Elon Musk is now the world’s fourth-richest person after Tesla’s shares surged 11% on Monday, closing at a record high and boosting his net worth by $7.8 billion and taking him past French luxury tycoon Bernard Arnault, the wealthiest non-American on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
🤝 AWS and Toyota team up - Amazon’s cloud computing unit will help Toyota build a platform to help manage and monetize data gathered from the automaker's global vehicle fleet. The deal is an expansion of existing collaboration with Toyota, with sufficient synergies for Amazon to use and apply learnings from the data towards its transportation operations.
👊 Apple’s EPIC battle - EPIC will sue in US courts to block Apple’s removal of “Fortnite” from its app store and as well as any retaliatory action against its other games. CEO says that Apple’s removal will stop its 350 million registered users from getting the updates needed to play the game’s most popular mode.
🖥️ INC wants FB held accountable - Congress Party has demanded that Facebook take action against its Indian executives after reports of favoring the ruling party came to light. The CPM supported Congress’ call for a joint parliamentary committee (JPC) probe. Good luck fellas.
🛒 SoftBank buys into AMZN - the company has built a stake worth around $1.2 billion in Amazon after management announced that the company would park excess cash from a massive asset sale programme in liquid stocks. So far the company has spent around $10 billion on buying into NFLX, TSLA and others.
😷 China’s COVID cure - China's vaccine maker CanSino Biologics Inc has won a patent approval from Beijing for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate Ad5-nCOV, marking the first COVID-19 vaccine patent granted by China.
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