Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy Monday folks.

Today we’re diving into -
- AMD’s $400 million planned investment into design centers
- An interesting trend in Indian diaspora’s remittances
- Adani’s plan to pick up some more big bucks

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 48 seconds - faster than you can pay the grocery waale bhaiya for your overpriced tomatoes. 🤷

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

AMD gets ready to shell out $400mn more. 🏭

TLDR -
- Building their biggest design lab yet in Bangalore.
- Hiring ~3,000 people locally, bringing total to 6,500 employees.
- 500k new square feet of pure R&D excellence.

The Indian government has spent years wooing semiconductor makers.

And it looks like tons of suitors are trickling in.

AMD is the latest of the lot - a very well known $200bn company that’s planning to spend $400 million in India over the next 4 years.

They’re gonna spend this on their biggest global design lab, HQ’ed in Bangalore, and beef up some of their local production units.

Total area of this design center is gonna cross 500,000 square feet and it’s also providing employment to 3,000+ local workers.

This adds them to the list of -
- Applied Materials ($400 million)
- Microchip ($300 million)
- Micron ($3 billion)
- Vedanta + Foxconn ($19.5 billion)
- Hundreds of others semiconductor businesses.

Electric. ⚡

Adani thinks about scooping up a few billions more. 🚀

TLDR -
- Hindenburg drama seems to be stuff of the past.
- Adani is putting pedal on the metal again and sticking with his debt-fueled expansion plan.
- Investor confidence is BACK.

Over the last 6 months, Adani’s share price has doubled (and then some more).

Stock markets have more-or-less forgotten the scathing Hindenburg report and are back to dhandha as usual.

A few things driving this -
- Improvement in debt-to-EBITDA ratio. One year back, Adani was at a D/E of 3.81 - now they’re at 3.27. Still relatively abysmal… but something is better than nothing.
- US-based GQG’s $1.9 billion investment across 4 Adani group companies. Shows a little more confidence from the “smart money”.
- A $400mn cash infusion from Barclays and DB.

The debt markets still say that Adani has work to do… and common-sense says so too.

Abhi ke liye… Modi hai toh mumkin hai 😉

Hulu exec builds a remittance app for Indian expats. 💸

TLDR -
- $90 billion of remittances come to India from abroad every year.
- Abound is a startup in the remittance market, & they just raised $10 million.
- They currently do $350mn in transfers every year.

Indians have the LARGEST diaspora out of every other country globally.

Diaspora = a fancy word for those who are living outside their home country.

The average Indian sends home over $3,000 every year - which is a staggeringly high number given the fact that India has a diaspora that’s bigger than 33 million.

Abroad just raised $10 million to take a bite of this remittance market and cut out outdated banks & slow money exchange companies.

Kinda like an NRI super-app. 🦹

In other news… ☕

Walmart splashes $1.4 billion to go all-in on Flipkart (TC)

Saudi economy posts an unexpected slowdown in growth (BBG)

SEC asked Coinbase to halt trading in everything but Bitcoin (FT)

Bank of Japan monetary policy spikes bond yields to decade-long high (FT)

IT Minister slams previous governments’ “incompetence” (TC)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Lots of ❤️,

Team CC