Market summary: 📊
Looks like we’re turning a corner. India finished decisively in the green, while the US saw back to back gains with growth tech favored for a change.
US:
S&P 500 - up 1.02%
Nasdaq - up 1.21%
India:
Nifty 50 - up 1.10%
Sensex - up 1.09%
Quick shot of espresso☕
✅ Year of the Tok — who says FAANG can’t be replaced! Cloudflare’s 2021 Internet Traffic Report shows TikTok got more traffic for the year of 2021 than Google, Amazon, Facebook or any other big tech platform, officially making it the most popular internet service worldwide. Tok jumped 7 spots compared to 2020 to flip the leaders. Meanwhile among other services, Amazon rules ecommerce, Netflix rules streaming, while Whatsapp dominates chat apps — no change. Here’s the report.
✅ OnlyFans has a new CEO — and yes, they’re Indian lol. Amrapali 'Ami' Gan will replace founder Tim Stokely as OF’s newest boss. Ami comes with a communications background, previously spent time in marketing with a cannabis venture, as well as with Red Bull and will spearhead OF’s strategy of moving away from adult content to wider entertainment — still keeping creators at the center.
Zee and Sony finally merge 🥳
What happened — after 3 months of infighting, multiple legal cases, and immense shareholder pressure, Punit Goenka prevailed — getting the board to approve the merger of Zee and Sony, creating one of the largest digital media businesses in India.
The deets — Sony’s owners will control the majority of the operation (owning 50.86% stake), with Zee’s promoters getting a 3.99% stake in the joint venture — with an option to increase their ownership to up to 20%. The rest going to be split by existing Zee shareholders.
And despite shareholder Invesco’s vehement protests, Punit Goenka will be MD and CEO — running the combined ship. One heck of a maneuver!
Revolting investor Invesco will continue to pursue its case with regulators, but it appears their leverage is rapidly thinning out.
Anyway, together Zee-Sony will own more than 70 TV channels, 2 major streaming services (Sony Liv and Zee5) with close to 175 million monthly active users, two major film studios, and a cash trove of $1.5 billion to boost content across formats.
Watchout Netflix, Hotstar, and Amazon.
Swiggy securing its base 🏍️
The food delivery king is considering leading a $200 million round into on-demand bike-taxi play Rapido — specifically for their B2B services.
Rapido’s services 10 million customers a year on its bike-taxis across 100s of cities. But since COVID, their B2B business a.k.a. delivering stuff for platforms like Zomato and Swiggy in free times, is what’s bringing most of the bread home.
While Swiggy’s exact gameplay is hazy, the check could be one way to secure a relationship with delivery partners who can support expansion into rapidly heating emerging verticals like quick commerce and grocery.
And also, keep ‘em from Zomato’s hands.
Meanwhile, a quick global ed-tech acquisition ☝️
Codecademy, the online coding tutorial platform, got acquired by Skillsoft in a $525 million deal, as post-COVID consolidation of edtech continues swiftly.
Skillsoft is a corporate trainer, offering technical upskilling and certificate courses through employee portals. They’ll continue to run Codecademy’s online portal, but will also tightly bundle the platform with their existing corporate offerings.
Big Tech giants made some acquisitions 💻
👓 First, Meta acquired an optoelectronics company called ImagineOptix — in what would be Meta’s 4th VR-related acquisition of the year. ImagineOptix basically designs lenses that make headsets thinner, lighter, smoother, more responsive, and eco-friendly. There’s a host of other optics related IP that the company’s R&D division owns — useful if Meta ever believes it can make and sell iPhone level volumes for VR headsets.
💸 Then in advertising technology — AT&T sold an advertising technology platform it owned, Xandr, to Microsoft. There was a time AT&T and other global carriers believed they could build digital-ad empires to rival the Web 2.0 platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Google) but most efforts ended miserably. Xandr, which makes about $300 million in revenues, will now strengthen Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar Bing Ad business.
Closing out — Quick look at a Fintech blow up 🤧
What happened — a hotshot silicon valley based lending venture called LendUp is being forced to shutter operations after regulators found widespread malpractices, false marketing, and harmful credit decisions when they pulled the curtain.
LendUp rose to fame by offering loans to customers that banks would typically ignore (standard pitch for most lenders) — but routinely employed deceptive marketing to upsell existing customers on new loans and to keep customers trapped.
Several Silicon Valley hotshots including PayPal, Google, a16z, are investors. All operations will now be wrapped up by early 2022.
What else are we Snackin’ 🍿
😷 Like 2020 times - Tata Medical made a fast-testing solution to boost COVID test capacity at places where bulk testing is needed.
🗣️ Get jabbed or GTH - Intel follows other big tech giants in telling employees to get vaccinated or face unpaid leaves.
💰 Rearrangements - Adani will raise almost $1 billion in fresh debt to restructure his debt load from the Mumbai Airport deal.
☝️ Still breathing - Job portal Monster.com is still around. Raises $18 million to expand operations.
Hit that 💚 if you liked today’s issue.
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