Happy Friday, Munchers! 🙏

Hope life is good and all is well.

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.

Yesterday, Ford got a buzz to their bottom line, Hindenburg found another target, and Apple got ready to go to Hollywood. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Investors are betting that Jerome Powell and his cronies are done with their mission to bring inflation crumbling. Turmoil in the banking sector and generally calm inflation seems to be pointing to zero rate hikes planned. 🤩

• Only one thing we know for sure? Fed sets the stage in our world.

• Inflation in the UK ticked up unexpectedly. This is pretty bad. From 9.9% to 10.1%, back to 9.9%, we all thought that inflation had peaked. Turns out it didn’t. Yesterday’s print came in at 10.4%. God save the UK.

Story Roundup

1 - Ford gets ready to take a big electric shock. ⚡

Ford has been trying to shift away from gas for years now.

But it looks like the EV bet isn’t paying the dividends they want.

Ford’s electric vehicle business lost $2.1 billion this year, and they forecasted even more pain to come - with a $3 billion loss scheduled this year.

These big bucks aren’t exactly going up in smoke - because Ford is still a profitable car company at it’s core (ahem, ahem) and made over $10 billion in profits last year.

EVs have much slimmer margins when compared with normal cars, which is also why it’s insanely difficult to defend your product and your bottom line when the entire market is bringing down prices every other week.

But Ford’s magic number is 3.

3 years till (they say) they will turn this billion-dollar dent into a steady stream of profit.

Electrifying. 🔋

2 - Hindenburg grabs Block by the neck. 🔪

Hindenburg just declared war. Again.

The target this time is this hippe-looking guy in the bottom right.

His name is Jack Dorsey. He used to be the CEO of Twitter and now runs a $44 billion fintech giant called Block.

Block makes money in a few ways -
- Credit card payments for small businesses
- A website hosting service
- A music streaming service
- some Buy now, Pay later services
- Peer-to-peer transactions

Oh, and, did I mention - they also put 1% of their company's assets into Bitcoin. 💀

Hindenburg did some digging and it turns out it is all a farce.

Block has been seriously overstating their user metrics and former employees estimate that 40%-75% of accounts they reviewed were fake, involved in fraud or duplicates.

Their services are also being used to facilitate crime. Lots of it. Hindenburg literally uploaded a video yesterday with rap video clips that had artists talk about how they used Block’s apps to pay hitmen.

Say what you will, our timeline is crazy.

An activist short seller responsible for tanking India's biggest conglomerate just published a rap compilation. 🤦🏻

3 - Apple takes a one-way trip to Hollywood. 🎥

Apple has a division of their business dedicated to creating exclusive content for Apple TV+.

Whenever this team creates a movie, web series, or TV show, it goes onto the Apple TV where their users can watch it.

But Apple wants to play a bigger game.

They want to get these in-house movies in cinemas. And it’s gonna cost them $1 billion to do it.

Apple’s plans aren’t final, but here is what we know.
- They want to put films in thousands of theaters for a one-month trial period
- They want to buy up production rights for all sorts of “evergreen” movies
- Movies released as exclusives aren’t really all that ‘value-adding’

We’ve come full circles.

Cinemas → Digital → Back to cinemas. 💀

4 - Accenture axes a ton of folks. 🪓

No one is safe. Not even the consultants.

Accenture is gonna be firing ~19,000 jobs - and it’s a hefty cost to the business.

Direct severance pay charges are gonna be sitting at $1.2 billion along with another $300 million earmarked for “office space consolidation”.

That’s corporate-speak for interior design on steroids.

Accenture has been riding the tech wave like no one else, since tons of companies were hungry for their advice on tech projects.

And the hiring binge has shown.

Accenture added more than 230,000 employees in the last 2 years. That’s eye-wateringly fast.

These job cuts look “offensive” - where Accenture is trying to front-load the layoffs to defend their profitability and long-term growth.

Maybe they should have hired themselves. 🙈

5 - Toshiba inks Japan’s biggest privatisation deal. 💸

Private Equity comes for everyone - and Japan's private equity has some big pockets.

And Toshiba just gave in.

$15 billion dollars.

It’s a good sign-off to an 8-year saga that Toshiba go from market leader to the literal brink of collapse.

Toshiba was struck by crisis in 2015 when it's US-based nuclear business faced some massive writedowns, and everything has been in jeopardy since.

And the PE guys are now gonna work their magic… can’t wait for all the job cuts and “streamlining”.

Crazy stuff. 😆

Hope you enjoyed this issue of Market Munch. If you’ve got any feedback - good or bad (😏) you can hit reply to this email and I'll get a ping in my inbox. Thanks a ton for reading!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

- Aryaansh ⚡