Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- India’s generic pharma scene,
- Zomato’s big-ticket stake sales,
- And Maruti-Suzuki’s mammoth $5.5bn plan.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 48 seconds - faster than you can go ham on a packet of Bingo Mad Angles. 🔥

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Doctors draw concern over cheap medicines. 💊

TLDR -
- Almost 400k doctors wrote an open letter to India’s health minister over generic drugs.
- 70% of medicines sold in India are generic, and 4.5% of those are subpar or harmful.
- Indian drug quality is currently 🗑️, making room for a big trusted name.

India is the world’s largest generic drug market.

FYI, Generic drug = paracetamol. Branded drug = Panadol.

These ‘generics’ are 30-80% cheaper than branded ones and sell like hotcakes in India’s price-sensitive market.

Brilliant for the producers - but they can be pretty bad for the folks who actually use them.

Almost 4.5% of all generics sold in India are subpar/harmful.

Seems like a small percentage, but 7 in 10 medicines sold last year were generic - so any defects get amplified on a MASSIVE scale.

Patients spend more time at the doctor, doctor prescribes them more medicines, patient buys more generic copycats - and this cycle repeats.

The real opportunity - Indian drug quality at the moment SUPER weak.

Suzuki splashes $5 billion and some more in India. 💸

TLDR -
- Maruti makes 2m cars/year, expanding to 4m/year by 2030.
- They’re also building up 2 new plants from scratch.
- Total investment is set at $5.4 billion.

The new playbook - make in India, make for the world.

Maruti Suzuki has the capacity to make 2 million cars/year - and they’re spending over $5 billion to double that number to 4 million/year.

There is one simple reason behind why - there’s WAY too much demand.

Over 57% of all pending passenger car bookings are for Maruti vehicles.

That comes to over 400,000 units - more than 2/3rds of what Tata and Hyundai sold last year.

Hot commodity! 🥵

Big shots sell chunks of Zomato stock. 🍅

TLDR -
- Tiger Global just fully sold out of Zomato for $136mn.
- Softbank also sold a $114mn block of shares.
- Looks like euphoria around profits is over, and a scaling slog starts now.

Lock-ins are over and it looks like some selling is in…

Big investors just offloaded ~$300 million in Zomato shares after their August 25 pre-IPO lock-in expired.

The culprits were Softbank and Tiger Global - both of whom are companies that need to show the world that not all is lost.

Tiger in particular had invested in Blinkit - and exiting for $136mn makes them 23% return on an 8-year old investment.

Subpar… 🤷

In other news… ☕

Saudi FX reserves hit their lowest low since 2008 (BBG)

Sales platform Apollo raises $100mn at a $1.6bn price tag (TC)

American home prices keep edging higher despite mortgage spikes (FT)

Ashneer Grover drops subscription options for his cricket gambling app (Inc42)

Bitcoin pops after the SEC sides with Grayscale (CNBC)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

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

Lots of ❤️,

Team Cutting Chai