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- Market Munch 🍎 | 10 July 2023
Market Munch 🍎 | 10 July 2023
Toyota supercharges their batteries, Meta starts a fight with Twitter, and Flipkart starts financing their customers. 🔥
Aryaansh Rathore
July 09, 2023
Happy Monday, Munchers! 🙏
Over the weekend, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 57 seconds.
Yesterday, Toyota made a breakthrough in battery tech, Mark Zuck stepped on Elon’s turf, and Flipkart popped the chequebook out. 🔥
Let’s dive in.
What’s hot, what’s not?
Market Commentary
Traders are betting that UK rates still have a long way to go - and markets have told us that 2-year borrowing costs are at a 15 year high.
PIMCO is a giant in the world of bond funds. They think that markets are “too confident” in central banks and that the worst is yet to come…
Strong volume data from EV makers is pushing some euphoria into other tech-driven businesses and pumping shares a little.
Story Roundup
New battery tech is in the pipeline - Toyota is calling this a “solid-state” battery.
Current batteries use graphite and a liquid electrolyte - this one is gonna use lithium and a solid electrolyte.
In short, these are all the pros -
- resolved durability issues (batteries are more long-lasting)
- battery ranges can top 1,200+ km
- battery charging times can drop below 10-12 min
- lower production costs (in the long run)
Right now, this stuff is still under development, but Toyota is hell bent on getting a solid-state EV battery to market.
It’s the only sure-shot way for them to close the gap to Tesla and the other big boys in the EV industry.
Electric. ⚡
Netflix took 1,300 days to reach 1 million users, Twitter took 730, Facebook took 304, Instagram took 76, and ChatGPT held the last record - 5 days for 1 million users.
Zuckerberg did it in 90 minutes.
And right now, at 97 million and going strong, the Threads app is quickly giving multiple gut-punches to Elon and co.
The biggest catalyst for this explosive growth has been the seamlessness of the signup process.
Existing Insta users can hop on Threads in <30 seconds (and follow everyone who they used to follow before).
For Threads to be bigger than Twitter, they just need 1 in 4 Insta users to use the app at least once a month.
Betting against Zuck in the long-run is a horrible strategy in the long-run. 🧵
Flipkart and Axis Bank have joined hands to hand out 5 lakh INR ($6,050) of credit to customers with a sub-30 second loan approval time.
These credit lines are also gonna have flexi repayment dates - from 6 to 36 months.
This seems like just another financing product, but it could be a massive hit.
India’s personal loan segment is one of the busiest in the world. Despite this, there’s barely any massive market-moving loan penetration.
On the other hand, sits Flipkart.
They’ve been collecting data on their 300 million users for a long, long while.
When they fuse that customer intelligence with a hefty credit line from Axis Bank, magic could happen.
Loan approvals will be done on the basis of past purchases + the customer’s CIBIL score.
Credit makes the world go round… 🤔
Borouge is an Abu Dhabi-based chemicals giant.
Last Friday, their shares surged ~10% after some ongoing talks of a merger with Borealis (another Austrian chemicals giant).
A merger like this could help a homegrown stalwart like Borouge get access to a European market which is well-established, and hop on the chemicals growth train from the US.
The final company’s value is gonna be close to $30 billion.
Cooking up some crazy stuff. ⚗️
5 - Russia takes a hard hit. 👊
Things are not looking sweet for Vlad Putin.
The Russian army has lost 50%+ of their troops/combat effectiveness in Ukraine.
This includes 2,500+ tanks, 10 million+ artillery shells, and billions of dollars.
At the same time, they can only produce 200 tanks a year, 1 million shells, and whatever they make from selling their commodities.
Russian tech is also much older in comparison with newer, cooler Western capabilities.
Time will tell where this one goes… 🪖
Hope you enjoyed this issue of the Market Munch. If you've got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email. Thanks a ton for reading!
Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏
Aryaansh