Market summary: 📊
Overall, turning out to be a great pre-holiday week. India climbed up another notch, with the US following up with a similar session. We’ve now pared most losses for the crazy past month.
US:
S&P 500 - up 0.62%
Nasdaq - up 0.79%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 0.69%
Sensex - up 0.68%
What’s brewing hot? ☕
✅ Year of Crypto — despite all the uncertainty here, Venture Intelligence reports India’s crypto startups raised over $511 million in VC money this year, a whopping 19x jump from last year — across some 13 major deals. OG Coinbase, rolling deep in IPO cash, backed the most horses, betting on both unicorn rounds of Coinswitch and CoinDCX. Even a tiny hint of regulatory clarity is expected to open the floodgates.
Foxconn’s India will IPO in 2022 🥳
What’s poppin’ — 2022 keeps lining up exciting bids. India’s largest mobile assembler and electronic contract manufacturer, Foxconn’s Bharat FIH, filed its docs with SEBI to raise $663 million from the public markets.
Foxconn holds the global crown for smartphone assembly and manufacturing — they put together iPhones and other premium phones in key markets, and are even dreaming of making EVs!
They kicked off India manufacturing under the Bharat FIH label in 2015, and has since rapidly scaled the operation to one of the top 50 companies locally in terms of revenues.
Here, they primarily make mechanical components (plastic and metal), as well as PCB assembly, and the assembly of finished mobile devices. Apple is a major customer, and FIH is also the maker of all Xiaomi phones in India (which owns a 15% market share here).
How them stats look — With production stalled due to COVID, revenues dropped over 60% to ₹15,800 crores last year, with profits of ₹161 crores,. But recovery has been solid since. Quick link to the DRHP.
Big picture — India’s electronics manufacturing services market is expected to grow to $135B by 2026. Digitization, shift of production out of China, GOI’s incentives, all present strong tailwinds to the leaders.
Hottest from venture street 💰
Bank Open, the neobanking service for small businesses in India, is raising a $150 million round from the Qatar Investment Authority, Temasek, and Tiger Global — doubling valuation to $1.3 billion!
Open had closed a $100 million round from Google and Visa barely 2 months ago. Business has been growing like a weed under COVID enforced digitization, now servicing 2 million business customers, processing annual transactions volumes of over $24 billion through its accounts. ✌️
Then a quick early social commerce raise ☝️
Social-commerce platform GoBillion raised a $2.9 million seed round from Y Combinator, Tinder founder Justin Mateen and a few other angels.
The Guwahati-based company pioneers group buying — helping customers shop online in geographically isolated groups and win bulk discounts. Business is just taking off, and funds will go towards expanding to 12+ cities.
Quick look at Kotak’s lending acquisition 🏦
What happened — Kotak Mahindra picked up Ford’s lending business in India — which primarily plays in car loans, after Ford packed its India operations earlier this year due to poor sales.
Kotak made the deal via Kotak Mahindra Prime, a car finance subsidiary of the financial conglomerate. They will get access to a lender base of about 16K customers, with an outstanding loan book of ₹425 crores.
Kotak seems quite serious about expanding share in the auto lending category — just months ago they had acquired Volkswagen India’s vehicle loan business too, with a ₹1,300 crores loan book.
While we’re on deals, ☝️
L&T’s asset management business, L&T AMC (dealing in mutual funds), will be sold to HSBC for $425 million.
L&T says the move is meant to be part of an ongoing agenda to streamline its conglomerate and unlock value for its shareholders. L&T AMC has some ₹80K crores in assets under management, manages about 2.4 million portfolios, and is the 12th largest asset management business in India.
Filter Coffee OOO 🎉
Look it’s Goa, it's Christmas, can’t help it… But seriously though, been a crazy year 2021, so we decided to take a break and unwind for the last week and half! Besides, the biz world is on snooze anyway (long as you’re not looking at the portfolio!).
We’ll be back with the daily starting Monday, 3rd Jan 2021. Until then… we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy, joyful New Year. Don’t go easy on the eggnog or the sweets or those vodka shots. 🤙 Ciao!
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
🏬 More stores - Blinkit set up 300 dark stores nationwide this year, focused on expanding its 10-minute grocery delivery program.
💰 Big selloff - Tencent distributed a one-time dividend of $16.4 billion to its shareholders in form of JD.com stock - a move meant to appease Beijing by liquidating Tencent’s ownership in other Chinese big tech giants.
📉 Shaky ground - Dip in PayTM stock prices is hurting its subsidiaries. PayTM Mall, the e-commerce venture is no longer a unicorn.
✋ Systems not ready - RBI extended the deadline for card tokenization by 6 more months.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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