Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy Monday, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- Walmart’s $3.5bn top-up on their Flipkart bet,
- Sony’s Zee acquisition + market plans,
- And Boat Lifestyle’s push to have an Indian supply chain.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 38 seconds - faster than you can split a Thums up + kathi roll at 2:30 AM. 🔥

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check

Walmart doubles down on their Flipkart bet. 🃏

TLDR -
- Walmart spent $3.5bn over the last 6 months buying out Flipkart shareholders.
- They want to take the fight to Amazon - who’s the current e-com king.
- Flipkart’s e-com unit is still growing at 25-30% annually.

Tons of big US companies are hunting for their next billion users - and a prime battleground is India.

Walmart just spent around $3.5 billion to buy up some more shares from Flipkart shareholders.

That brings their total ownership of Flipkart to ~80%, and gives a clear signal about where they’re placing their chips.

E-commerce is now second nature to Indian consumers - clearly seen in Flipkart’s e-com business which is still growing at ~25-30% a year.

There’s obviously merit in going for the Indian market - but it all becomes clear when you see that Jeff Bezos & Amazon have planned out a $26 billion investment in India over the next 6-7 years.

Walmart is their biggest competitor in e-commerce, and both are gunning to be #1.

Lightspeed… ⚡

Sony gets ready for the streaming wars. 🤺

TLDR -
- Sony just closed it’s $10 billion Zee acquisition.
- They’re gonna invest another $1.6bn over the coming years.
- Plan is to become a high-quality content powerhouse, and earn off of the licensing.

In the 1980s, Sony gambled $3 billion on the acquisition of Columbia Pictures.

They turned the company around, and broke Hollywood.

Looks like they’re trying the same thing in India - this time with a $10 billion acquisition of Zee Media.

Sony just bought them out, and their combined entertainment giant will own 70+ TV channels, a literal film studio, and wide-spread reach over Indian media.

Bollywood churns out more movies than any other industry, and as middle-class India grows, appetite for masaledar content grows too.

Sony doesn’t want to be just another streaming platform though - they wanna be a dealer.

They’ll invest time and money creating content, and earn royalties from licensing it to OTHER OTT platforms.

For this to work, they’ll need to generate high-quality content which THEY OWN the IP to at a cost lower than the rest of the market.

Time will tell whether this works…

Streaming wars! 📽️

Boat Lifestyle roars past the $500mn/year mark. 🎧

TLDR -
- Boat just passed the $500m/year revenue mark.
- They produce 70% of their products + in India, and just set up Boat Labs for specialized production & R&D.
- End game is to create an ecosystem/platform - which they acquired a wearable solutions platform for.

“Hum bhi bana lenge” has built a brand that does $500mn (4000 Cr) in top-line a year…

Boat has recently been making a big push to go from "just another dropshipping company” to an aspirational electronics brand for middle-class India.

They manufactured 15 million units last year - 70% of which were manufactured in India.

With any hardware company, the end game is always to create an ecosystem - kinda like Apple did.

One Apple device is good enough to suck you in - but that’s not the case with Boat.

Boat’s products are all pretty isolated - whereas with Apple/Samsung, everything fits in together like a jigsaw puzzle.

They’re making baby steps to fix this - with an acquisition of a Singapore-based wearable solutions platform.

Picture abhi baaki hai…

In other news… ☕

Chinese lenders give out billion-dollar credit lines to Russian banks (FT)

UAE firm buys a $630mn stake in Egypt cigarette giant (BBG)

Jio Financial gets removed from Sensex (Inc42)

Tesla full-self-driving prices hit $12k, an all time low (TC)

Russian rouble hits a 16-month low (FT)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

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

Lots of ❤️,

Team Cutting Chai