Happy morning, Munchers! 🙏

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 53 seconds.

Yesterday, Foxconn packed their bags to unpack them again, Xi Jinping called for some more economic firepower, and Disney thought deeper about their India business. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Story Roundup

1 - Foxconn keeps it’s India options open. 😅

Hot on the heels of walking out of a $20bn semiconductor deal, Foxconn wants to put roots down in India - but elsewhere.

They want to set up 4-5 fab lines - basically factories that create semiconductors.

The partnership that they ripped up with Vedanta had a license for them to manufacture 40nm chips - but now they wanna take a dig at 28nm and 14nm ones.

The smaller the number of “nms”, the more powerful the chips are, and the harder they are to make.

Once bitten, twice shy… 🤔

2 - Xi Jinping rallies for more economic juice. ⚡

Chinese prez just set growth targets for the country, and they’re pretty mediocre.

They will be aiming for GDP growth of 5% this year, the lowest target in 35+ years.

The government’s single and only goal this year is to prioritise economic stability, because the Chinese economy is relying on a lot of crutches right now.

Their SMB sector has been blown out of the water because of the COVID lockdowns and the manufacturing sector has been shaken up because of how badly supply chains have been destroyed.

Time to say bye-bye to all that rip-roaring growth.

3 - Disney mulls over their Star India business. 💫

Disney is tired of their years of underperformance in India, and they wanna change things.

They’ve been chatting with a few banks on strategies to explode their India biz, or sell it while they can.

Star India’s revenue is gonna take a 20% hit this year and drop to under $2 billion.

Their streaming service Hotstar is also set to lose 8-10 million subs next quarter.

This is why you give away IPL for free. 😅

4 - Bank of America nets a $250 million penalty for playing with their customers. 🤦

This should be front page news… but the media won’t sell it to you.

Bank of America just got fined 250 million dollars.

They engaged in a LOT of financial trickery with customers, including -
- opening customer accounts without consent
- withholding credit card rewards
- double-dipping on fees (ie charging the same fees twice)
- automatically bill customers extra for no reason
- and a lot more horrible stuff

All of this treachery made BoA hundreds of millions of dollars richer.

Crazy…

5 - Jack Ma’s rollercoaster success story hits a new low. 🪫

Things have been going downhill for Jack Ma ever since he put a target on the Chinese government in 2020.

They blocked his company’s IPO, while also cutting down his control in Ant Group - his personal voting shares shrunk from 50% to 6.2%.

And he also got pulled away from the limelight ever since he started talking smack about the CCP.

Now, he bought back shares of Ant Group at a steep discount - knocking $4 billion off his personal net worth.

Power corrupts…

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!

You might also wanna follow up on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram.

Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

Aryaansh