Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Hope aal izz well!

Today we’re diving into -
- Paramount Global’s $500mn exit from Reliance,
- Stripe’s trillion-dollar domination,
- and the return of the crypto bros.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 47 seconds - faster than Yashasvi Jaiswal ran through England’s bowlers… 🏏

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Paramount Global ditches their $500mn stake in Reliance’s media arm. 💪

TLDR -
- Reliance’s media empire just grew with the buy-back of a $520mn stake from Paramount Global.
- This follows on from a recent announcement regarding a bumper takeover of Disney’s India operations.
- Reliance now owns over 85% of the OTT market and will be priming for growth first, profits second (since it looks like regulators won’t bat an eye)

Mukesh Ambani? More like Indian Logan Roy…

American media company Paramount just inked a deal with Mukesh Ambani to sell a 13% shareholding in Reliance’s media arm to… Reliance’s media arm.

Paramount will receive $520mn from proceeds of the share sale - giving the company an effective valuation of ~$4 billion.

This consolidation comes just a few days after Reliance announced another bumper media deal with Disney, where Ambani and Co bought out Disney’s India operations to package into their own products and create a video giant that controls over 85% of the on-demand streaming market.

Both these mergers combined will make Reliance practically unkillable in the market, since they will own some of the hottest sporting assets and streaming rights that exist, starting with -
- the next 4 years of IPL (enough to build a billion dollar business from alone)
- flagship ICC cricket events
- the Premier League
- the FIFA World Cup
- and so many more, including domestic cricket, the Wimbledon, etc

And this doesn’t even count all the other media that people watch, which includes movie catalogs from HBO, NBCUniversal, Disney, and web series - which are a growing market in itself.

It makes sense for both sides - Paramount and Disney get a decent exit without having the hassle of building a business from scratch in a market where the unit economics don’t quite sit right, and Reliance gets a head-start on their way to monopolize yet another industry.

For some reason, the antitrust department’s been pretty quite on this one… 🙈

Stripe crosses $1 trillion in payments processed. 💸

TLDR -
- Stripe’s businesses are growing like crazy - they did $1tr of payment processing, and earned over $30 billion as a minimum from that.
- They have over 100 clients who process over $1 billion per year with them, making up 10ish% of total transaction volume.
- The moral of the story is simple… KILL problems one by one.

As some wise man said, software is eating the world…

Stripe is an American payment processor, and they are one of our time’s most valuable companies - both figuratively and literally.

They just went public with a few numbers, and it looks like over $1 TRILLION’s worth of transactions were placed using Stripe’s payment gateways. Considering the fact that their fees start at 2.9%, this means that Stripe’s top-line revenue is $29 billion at the very least.

If that number wasn’t big enough, their growth will definitely shock you. Despite processing $1tr of payments, Stripe still manages to increase revenue at a clip of ~25-30% a year, which is a crazy speed to compound at.

The best part is that all this extra growth is finally translating to more cash in the bank, as Stripe mentioned that they were ‘robustly cash flow positive last year, and expect to be this year too.’ Investors react to profits like this the same way cats react to catnip, and you can make of that what you will.

My favorite part of Stripe’s entire release was this: they offer ‘Revenue and Finance Automation’ services, which include things like billing tools, accounting software, revenue recognition, etc. These services alone generate over $500 million for Stripe - it’s practically a business within another business, because those financials would put some of the best fintechs out there to shame.

All of this good stuff means one thing: there sure as hell isn’t gonna be a down round when they get back into the market… 🤷

Memecoin mania makes it to the front pages again. 🪙

Bitcoin has been going BONKERS ever since spot ETFs were rolled out - meaning that your average Joe with a brokerage account can now invest in the world’s weirdest asset with their retirement funds.

All of this extra trading volume is pumping more liquidity into the biggest listed cryptos - benefitting none other than Bitcoin the most.

BTC prices crashed upward of $73k per coin and have been up almost 50% over the last month. Bitcoin liquidity has also improved notably over the past two months and is up roughly 60% since the approval of spot BTC ETFs in early January.

Trading volumes for the 10 spot Bitcoin ETFs began to pick up considerably in late February, in line with Bitcoin’s surge. We’re seeing almost 1/6th of every dollar going toward crypto being channeled through ETFs - not bad for an asset class that came about 2 months back.

Interesting times to be alive… and even better times to YOLO your pocket money into Bitcoin call options. 🙈

In other news… ☕

UAE inks a $5.5 billion deal to build a Dubai-style hub in Budapest (BBG)

Marlboro plans to exit a $2.2bn stake in Inbev (FT)

SpaceX aims for a massive launch for their Starship today (TC)

US House passes a bill that could ban TikTok (CNN)

Japanese rocket explodes seconds after launch, Roman Roy style (NYT)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Lots of ❤️,

Team CC