Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- Harley’s fully sold out stock + India’s bike market,
- Meesho’s slimmer losses + IPO plans,
- And, Micromax’s 180-degree turn from phones to EVs.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 49 seconds - faster than you can make a steaming-hot bowl of cheese Maggi. 🍜

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check 🥵

Harley-Davidson hype grips India. 🚲

TLDR -
- Harley is facing a “too much demand problem” in India.
- 26,000 customers have fully paid them in cash for a bike that’s set to be produced.
- 65% of these 26k customers opted for the 2.7L-priced highest end model.

2 years back, Harley-Davidson left India because of “low demand” and “sluggish growth”.

Yesterday, they were forced to stop orders for their new India-focused bike because there was more interest than they could possibly handle.

Long story short -

• Hero Motocorp teamed up with Harley to create a bike for the Indian market

• It’s gonna be a Harley-branded, Hero manufactured vehicle

• Pricing is gonna still be premium (gotta stay Harley)

In the last month, they’ve received just under 26,000 customers who have paid fully in cash for their new Harleys.

The crazier part - of these 26,000, 65% of the orders are for the highest-end model - weighing in at 2.7L INR ($3.3k).

This tells us two big things.

1 - You can build a multimillion dollar business by servicing India’s 1%

2 - There is still CRAZY appetite for luxury in India

Meesho marches on firmly for IPO. 🫡

TLDR -
- Meesho is now finally profitable, so they’ve started looking into an IPO.
- 54% revenue growth, ~40% order volume growth, and a $400mn run-rate.
- Interesting trend - lots of the big startups are deciding to prepare for IPO just about now.

Just one week after announcing a pure profit after tax, Meesho is all set to go public in the next 12-18 months.

Their improvements in core fundamentals are crazy.

Customer acquisition cost was brought down from 250 INR/pp to 70 INR/pp in just one year.

Along with that, their average order value increased by 35% too, helping them build in better margins.

They currently do around 3.5 million orders a day and this lays out a solid growth trajectory for them to build on in the public markets.

Shipping like crazy…

Micromax makes a hard U-turn into EVs. 🫨

TLDR -
- Micromax is making a soft pivot from phones to EVs.
- They will start by releasing a few two-wheeler models.
- Not much of this is official yet, just from filings and sources inside the company.

Micromax was once India’s biggest phone company.

Today, they have less than 0.5% of the market.

The story is insane.

They started with the dream of catering to the Indian class that didn’t have the money to splash on a Blackberry or a Samsung.

Using a China-powered supply chain, they managed to create a line of sub $200 phones and annihilate other brands by creating aspirational similar-looking products.

It got to a point where they poached Samsung’s India CEO to join their business and became the biggest phone brand in India.

They eventually got their own underpricing treatment by brands like Xiaomi and Oppo who played on India’s prince sensitivity, and there is barely any chatter about the brand today.

Sources inside the company have said that Micromax is now pivoting to EVs.

Starting off with two-wheelers, then moving onto cars.

Electric… ⚡

In other news… ☕

Free ad-supported streaming booms in US too (TC)

European gas prices jump 40% and give markets flashbacks (FT)

Portnoy buys back his Barstool stake from PENN (BBG)

Amazon chats to Arm about being an anchor investor in the IPO (FT)

LK-99 drama decides to boil over (TC)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Lots of ❤️,

Team C