Japanese private equity giant SoftBank has sold shares worth $310 million to FirstCry, the omnichannel retailer of infant products. The company is likely to file DRHP for an IPO later this week. This sale was done in two rounds to high-net-worth investors and family offices. This pegs the valuation of FirstCry at around $3.75 billion, four times the valuation at which SoftBank acquired the stake. SoftBank still has a large stake in FirstCry even after this sale, and the PE fund hopes to realize close to $1.3 billion from its investment.
The market cap of 3 out of the 10 most valuable listed companies surged by Rs70,313 crore last week, with Reliance being the leader of the pack. While RIL gained over Rs 46,000 crore in valuation, other gainers were Hindustan Unilever, adding Rs 12,241 crore, and HDFC Bank, adding Rs 11,050 crore. Among the losers, ICICI Bank lost Rs 30,235 crore, TCS lost Rs 12,715 crore, SBI lost Rs 10,486, Infosys lost Rs 7,160 crore, and ITC lost Rs 3,991 crore. With the recent rally, LIC has been the latest entrant into the top-10 market cap club on the stock exchanges.
Walt Disney and Reliance have signed a non-binding term sheet in London to merge their India-based media operations, creating a massive entity with operations across media. It gives Reliance an OTT status at par with Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Zee-Sony in India. Reliance will retain a majority stake in the JV. The negotiations have been going on for months. RIL is likely to pay cash for the majority stake, and Jio Cinema will also be included in the deal. It will save Disney the losses it is racking up and give Reliance a solid platform.
InCred, one of India’s leading fintech firms, became the second unicorn of the year after it raised $60 million in a funding round from new and existing investors. In this latest round, InCred is valued at $1.04 billion. Ranjan Pai of Manipal Group led the funding round, with participation from family offices as well as PE investors. InCred plans to deploy this additional capital towards its core business verticals like consumer loans, student loans, and MSME lending. These segments saw robust growth in recent years.
The last week of December 2023 is likely to see six major listings on the IPO mainboard. During the week, Muthoot Microfin, Suraj Real Estate Developers, and Motisons Jewellers will get listed on December 26; Credo Brands (Mufti), Happy Forgings, and RBZ Jewellers will get listed on December 27, while the final listing on December 28 will be of Azad Engineering. These companies, between them, raised Rs 3,910 crore with subscription ratios ranging between 12X and 173X. Some of them were very small issues.
Paytm laid off over 1000 employees across its operations, sales, and engineering teams. Paytm called it resizing after the implementation of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology stack, but clearly Paytm has been under cash flow pressure for some time. With these layoffs, Paytm will be able to save about 15% on manpower costs. After the RBI stricture on unsecured loans, Paytm also shut down its small-ticket loan business, which made many employees redundant. This is the second round of layoffs by Paytm since 2021.
According to the World Steel Association, India registered 11.4% growth in crude steel output at 11.7 million metric tons (MT) in November 2023. For the first 11 months of 2023, steel production was 12.1% higher year over year at 128.2 MT. Global steel output for November was up 3.3% at 145.5 MT, so Indian steel output is growing much faster. China leads the way by a margin, producing 952.1 MT. India is the second largest steel maker after China and is followed by Japan, the US, Russia, South Korea, Germany, and Turkey in the ranking.
India saw its crude import bill fall significantly to $87.1 billion in the April-November period from $113.4 billion in the year ago period. However, import volumes have largely remained unchanged, and this can be attributed to lower-cost Russian crude, which is the mainstay of the Indian crude import basket today. Of late, such Russian discounts have narrowed from $30/bbl to just about $6/bbl. This resulted in a huge trade deficit with Russia, but, as the above data shows, it was worth it. OPEC imports fell by 48.1% in FY23.
