Market Munch 🍎 | 28 November 2022

COVID shakes China up again, Twitter 2.0 is born, and BYJU's takes yet another dent. πŸ”₯

Happy Monday, Munchers! πŸ™

Hope your weekend went well, and welcome back. 🀷

As always, here is your daily dose of the news that matters, from Wall Street to Dalal Street - in 4 minutes and 59 seconds.

Over the weekend anti-COVID protests shook China up, Twitter pressed the reboot button, and Huawei got banned from selling stuff in America. πŸ”₯

Let’s dive in.

Story Roundup

The Chinese government is realising that people aren't enjoying lockdowns.

Police were struggling to tame large crowds that gathered across Shanghai - all part of an anti-COVID movement that's posing a big challenge to the CCP.

People were occasionally clashing with police, so a few jabs here and there were bound to be thrown.

Movement is gathering against President Xinping's zero-COVID policies, and time will tell how long this party goes on.

It's given us all flashbacks of 2020, when we were told that office and school would be shut down for 2 weeks.

How quickly that became 2 years. 🀷

The world's richest dude just dropped his game plan for Twitter.

Elon released some slides from a Twitter company talk, and here are the highlights.

Twitter's current state - - signups are at an all-time high- user active minutes are at an all-time high- hate speech seems to be subsiding

The future of Twitter - - Elon wants to make it "an everything app"- Long-form content is going to make it's way on- Video will be given a focus too- Twitter will relaunch "Blue Verified" - the same thing we had before. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.- Increased recruiting!

Oh man. This bird's got quite some wings. πŸš€

India's largest company is the world's largest ed-tech too.

But their report card has a lot of red marks.

An investor holding a 10% stake in BYJU's wrote their investment down by 73% - sending their valuation from $22bn to $5.8bn.

The crazy thing is that even this valuation is a 20.5x multiple of 2021 revenue. πŸ’Έ

Byju's losses also skyrocketed - going from $29 million to a jaw-dropping $577 million. That's a 30-fold increase.

Last year, they spent about $3 billion on acquiring virtually everyone they can - and it's showed up in their books.

Cheap money is a drug, and hyper growth loss making startups are junkies.

House of cards. ♠️

Washington is very liberally hitting Chinese tech companies around the head with their ban hammer.

The US has banned all new sales and approvals of telecom equipment from China's Huawei and ZTE.

That means we'll see a big dip in sales of Chinese-made phones, security cameras, watches, tablets, laptops, and every other device known to man.

Washington has called it an "unacceptable risk to national security" and have people on tilt.

Pretty whack. πŸ’€

The State Bank of Pakistan is on a course to slide tackle spiraling inflation, and they took a step toward this goal with a jumbo 100 basis point interest rate hike.

Pakistan's average Joe is being squeezed by spiking inflation (which stood at 26.6% in October), and the SBP wants to step in to sort stuff out.

Floods have also ravaged the agriculture industry, which takes care of about 45% of the labour force. That's around half the country being impacted.

Catching inflation is a difficult task.

But the SBP is on the chase. πŸƒβ€β™‚οΈ

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Cheers, and have a lovely day. πŸ™

Aryaansh