Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy Monday, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- India’s increased appetite for Apple,
- Nvidia + Tata + Reliance’s AI infra bet,
- And Koo’s cash-strapped next steps.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 54 seconds - faster than rain ruined India’s brilliant innings yesterday. 💀

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

India’s confidence in Apple soars 3X. 🍎

TLDR -
- Apple India revenues doubled over the last 9 months to $7.5bn+.
- Their general business has been pretty down - declining sales for the last 9 months.
- Speaks volumes about how you can make a KILLING just by selling to India’s 0.01%.

Apple’s India market share in 2022 - 3.2%

Apple’s India market share in 2023 - 7% and growing

For decades, the tech bros in Cupertino have been trying (with very little success) to break into Indian consumers’ hands.

But something interesting is happening.

Their overall revenues have been declining for 9 straight months (Apple’s worst sales slump EVER), while their India top-line 2Xed over the same period.

Smartphone revenue in India alone crossed $6 billion - there are still things like manufacturing, services, and add-ons to count.

Mobile phone markets in general have been having a pretty bad time, as consumers are getting hammered by inflation on one side and higher interest rates on the other.

But India has a fast-growing “aspirational” middle class who is willing to spend good money for premium products.

California’s kombucha-guzzling tech bros are loving the mohaul here. 🚀

Nvidia shakes hands with Reliance and Tata to build AI infra. 🤖

TLDR -
- Nvidia is supplying chips to Jio + Tata to build their AI capabilities.
- Jio is also in the market to build and train their OWN LLM.
- Talks have just started, so no numbers revealed yet.

A crazier collab than all 3 Spidermen coming together…

Reliance, Tata, and Nvidia are teaming up to build out India’s AI infrastructure.

Here’s what we know so far -
- Nvidia will provide their best-in-class CPU/GPU chips
- Jio will handle all of the maintenance and upkeep
- Tata will use some resources to build generative AI applications for their enterprise clients

Jio also wants to take a stab at building their own language model (basically an AI that’s been trained on whatever Jio wants it to be trained on), but that might be an expensive affair - it costs 200-350 million USD to do something of that scale.

All operations will be based out of a 2,000 MW data center - for reference, running costs can go anywhere from 7-12 million USD per megawatt for a large data center.

Electric! ⚡

Twitter alternative Koo stops chirping. 🐦

TLDR -
- Koo, a Twitter alternative “worth” $220mn is hunting for a buyout.
- Their MAUs have fallen from 4.5m to 1.5m in less than 2 years.
- Revenues seem to be down bad - they supposedly have only $2.5mn in the bank!

Bleeding cash, bleeding users, and bleeding traffic - Koo is a real-time example of a social media startup dying a slow death.

Koo started as a Twitter alternative and had some brilliant initial traction.

Their monthly active users quickly rocketed past the 4.5 million mark by Jan ‘21 and they picked up over $50mn at a $220mn+ valuation.

Even Virat Kohli and Tiger Shroff invested in them…

But cut to today, and things aren’t looking as good.

Their monthly users are struggling to cross 1.5 million and their cash balance is close to just $2.5 million.

They had to fire over 30% of their staff in April and heavily revamped their business structure.

Because of this, they’ve been hunting for a white knight - founders have reportedly spoken to ShareChat and Microsoft for an acquisition.

Bole jo koyal bago mein….
🙈

In other news… ☕

Arm considers hiking their IPO price range (BBG)

Credit funds have a field day (FT)

NPCI comes out with a cross-border payment for UK based NRIs (Inc42)

G20 ends with a bang (YT)

BYJU’s only bright spot begins to dull - offline tuitions (TMC)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it. Have a mauj-masti filled day.

Lots of ❤️,

Team Cutting Chai