Namaste, Sat Sri Akaal, and Salaam. 🫡

Happy morning, folks. 🙏

Today we’re diving into -
- The moves that took Meesho to it’s first profit,
- Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s Paytm gambit,
- And, Adani Green’s stake sale to a Qatari investor.

Our read time today is 4 minutes and 35 seconds - faster than you can grab a choco bar from DMart. 🍦

Let's dive in. 👇

Market Vibe Check 🥵

Meesho finally tastes it’s first profit. 💸

TLDR -
- Meesho self-reported a pure profit after tax of “single-digit-crores”.
- They also claimed a 43% growth in order volume + 54% growth in revenue.
- These numbers have been internally reported - no auditor sign-off or anything, but I doubt the founders have much reason to lie 😂

The second big startup this month to finally go green - Meesho is now a profitable company (from what the founders tell us).

Best part - no “adjusted” EBITDA, or financial massaging - it’s all pure profit after tax.

Meesho also said that they’ve seen a 43% increase in order volumes and a 54% increase in their top-line revenue over the last 12 months.

One catalyst could be their newly launched Meesho Mall unit.

Mall is basically a marketplace.

Other brands are allowed to sell to Meesho’s users on their own platform, and Meesho takes a generous commission in exchange.

This virtually brings in a nice margin puff without them having to do too much of the heavy lifting.

Obviously - these numbers are not audited or verified by a third-party, but there doesn’t seem to be any great reason for the founders to lie about something like this.

Operational excellence!

Vijay Shekhar Sharma doubles down into PayTm. ♠️

TLDR -
- VSS - the founder of Paytm is now the company’s largest shareholder.
- It’s a very cheeky act of financial engineering which helps Paytm out a lot.
- No more Chinese influence hanging over them (at least in the government’s eye).

For a long time, the Reserve Bank of India has had a stormy legal relationship with Paytm because of their China links.

One of Paytm’s lead investors and biggest shareholders was Chinese giant Ant financial - and Indian government didn’t like this very much.

So they decided to -
- Ban Paytm’s Payments Bank from onboarding new customers
- Reject their application to be an NBFC (non-banking financial company)
- Hold up their acquisition of Raheja QBE Insurance
- cause lots more bureaucratic hell for the company

So Ant Financial and VSS decided to do a cheeky “share-swap” of sorts - Vijay Shekhar Sharma gets all of Ant’s shares while Ant gets the right to own those same shares in the future.

The specifics of it all are in this brilliant article which requires a little bit of concentration to understand 💀

This should ease the pressure on Paytm from the government's side and help things go by smoother.

It's all a regulator's world...

Adani (finally) raises some equity… 💀

TLDR -
- Qatari firm INQ has scooped up a share in Adani Green worth $475 million
- AG’s shares have regained some momentum, 2Xing and then some more over the last 5 months.
- Slowly but surely breaking free from all of those Hindenburg allegations...

After months of bleeding stock market performance - Adani seems to be back and roaring.

Their renewable energy unit Adani Green just picked up almost $500mn from a Qatari state-owned investment company.

This comes (lukewarm) hot on the heels of GQG Partners’s additional $1 billion investment into Adani (which brings their total stake in Gujju bhai to $2.9 billion).

Modi hai toh mumkin hai… 😭

In other news… ☕

Lab-made meat startup raises $35 million (TC)

Meta says bye-bye to their AI scientists to focus on AI that actually makes money (FT)

Zoom calls their employees back to the office (ironic) (FT)

Crypto exchange Bitstamp hunts for funding (BBG)

Indian laptops + tablets record a spike in sales after import curb speculation (ET)

And that’s the tea the chai for today.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoyed it.

Lots of ❤️,

Team C