Published: 12/14/2020
Good morning, it's Monday, and this is Vedica with the update today. As all of you already know, I am extremely cynical about the recent narratives demonizing foreign firms and capitals. It seems like The East India Company is everyone's favourite comparison these days. It came up again over the weekend!
➡️ Zomato has closed a $660 million primary financing round at a post-money valuation of $3.9 billion. 10 new investors are joining the round including Tiger Global, Kora, Luxor, Fidelity (FMR), D1 Capital, Baillie Gifford, Mirae Asset and Steadview Capital. The company's last round in August valued the company at $3.18 billion.
➡️ There is a lot of talk that the company is looking to IPO in 2021 (I'd bet in the US) and this will be the last round raise before going public. Zomato, along with other food delivery apps, suffered during the initial stages on the pandemic and lockdown, but have bounced back strongly.
➡️ Zomato co-founder Deepinder Goyal tweeted that December 2020 is expected to be the highest ever GMV month in the company's history with a ~25% higher GMV than the previous peak in February 2020. The company has said it has delivered 150M orders since March 23 lockdown.
➡️ If Zomato does IPO next year, it will be interesting to see how the company improves its unit economics. Last year the company recorded revenue of $394M with EBITDA losses at $293M. I'd love to see how these numbers have trended this year.
2. https://bit.ly/3rfKwtD: Amazon's positive impact on Indian SMBs
➡️ I know it's very fashionable to hate on Amazon, but I'm actually very bullish on the company's future in India (if the govt. doesn't make their life difficult) and actually think India's fragmented retail market can really benefit from a big player like Amazon providing both a platform from SMBs and helping modernize the country's poor supply chain infrastructure.
➡️ The company recently launched an SMB impact report highlighting some of the key milestones achieved by the SMBs working with Amazon and the benefits of digitization on entrepreneurs and businesses across sectors.
➡️ Some of the big number of the report iare very interesting: 4,152 Indian sellers surpassed INR 1 crore in sales in 2020 with the number of crorepati sellers grew 29% YOY. Emerging brands on Amazon Launchpad saw their business grow by 135 per cent YoY. The number of women entrepreneurs under 'Saheli' program saw their business grow nearly '15x'. Weavers and artisans who are part of 'Karigar' program saw their business grow by 2.8 times.
➡️ India's ~65M SMBs are obviously the lifeblood of the economy (~99% of all companies in India are SMB or rather MSME in the Indian parlance) and digital platforms can play a big role in bringing them online and helping them become successful.
➡️ The whole report is an interesting read and can be found here: https://d39w7f4ix9f5s9.cloudfront.net/e8/0d/b9533b9f49cd9534ee1b2b4f0008/amazon-smb-impact-report-2020-final.pdf
Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated BONUS (Tweet of the day): https://twitter.com/hels/status/1340826218338332672?s=20
This post is only for paying subscribers, but it’s ok to forward every once in a while. If you received this as a forward, consider subscribing here 👉🏽 https://keepingupwithindia.com/