Happy Monday, 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, TikTok saw some big bucks in Southeast Asia, a SoftBank-backed app went belly up, and Wagner made big moves. 🔥

Let’s dive in.

What’s hot, what’s not?

Market Commentary

• Oil and gas majors are putting big bucks toward some diversification into rare metals - specifically lithium. Commodities are always in favour.

• The futures market showed that investors are betting on UK interest rates going even higher - the highest in almost 30 years.

• Moody’s is warning that the private credit market - worth $1.4 trillion - is gonna come under some big stress soon.

Story Roundup

1 - TikTok turns East. 🌏

TikTok has been waging an eternal war against regulators.

The biggest pain for them? America.

Executives have been grilled, stake sales have been discussed, and lawmakers have called them a cancer.

But TikTok has recognized where the big opportunity is - in Southeast Asia.

Indonesia specifically will receive a staggering $10 billion investment from Bytedance and co.

Both their in-house ecommerce feature and their advertising revenue keeps hitting new highs - they did $4bn of sales in Asia last year.

This year? They’re on track to cross $15.5bn.

Short-form is king… 👑

2 - IRL turns out to be a hot mess. 🤦

If you thought that things couldn’t get worse for SoftBank - thing again.

One of their massive investments in a $1.2 billion-dollar social media startup has gone terribly awry.

The company is called IRL - and they raised almost $200 million to revolutionize the world of messaging.

When they reported user numbers at 20 million - people started thinking that some fishy stuff was going on.

And some investigation led to the truth.

95% of IRL’s users are all bots.

This looks like a case of the perils of VC money.
- Founder takes VC check
- Founder feels need to hit stupidly high growth targets
- Founder splashes money on marketing without having a product that solves problems
- Founder spoofs his users
- Founder gets caught, the end.

Due-diligence. 💀

3 - Wagner puts a dent in Putin’s firepower. 💪

Some shocking stuff is going down in Russia - here’s a quick explainer.

This dude called Prigozhin had an army of 25,000 people. (the army is called Wagner Group)

When Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin called upon Wagner and supplied them with weapons, food, and money.

But after a while, Putin’s wallet started running out of the big bucks - so he couldn’t afford to keep Wagner armed.

And that made them angry - so they decided to stage a coup.

It’s a literal civil war - the Russian army is fighting with this Wagner mercenary group.

Our version of reality is crazy.

4 - Amazon gets ready for some massive capex in India. 🏭

This weekend, Andy Jassy met with Narendra Modi.

The final outcome of the meeting - Amazon is gonna place their chips and make a big bet on India.

In the next few years they’re gonna splash almost $26 billion dollars onto warehouses, supply chains, and offices.

India is a growing and key market for Amazon - and they’re facing some menacing competition.

Walmart has put together almost $3 billion and is getting armed with more cash.

E-commerce wars… 🛒

5 - BYJU baba gets into some more trouble. 💀

For a long while now, BYJU’s has been itching for an IPO.

And behind it all, is Byju baba himself - the founder and CEO.

After the market fell apart and investors stopped pouring endless amounts of cash into loss-making, hyper-growth startups - they decided against it.

So they went for the next best thing - take their profitable acquisitions public.

BYJU’s started with the IPO of Aakash - and they were gonna go public (business as usual).

But regulators flagged one thing.

Byju himself owns 31% of the Aakash company.

Conflict of interest who? 🙄

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!

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. 🙏

AryaanshMarket M