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Adani v Ambani: The Battle of the Tycoons
finance.yahoo.com
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
In August Mr Adani launched a hostile takeover of ndtv, a broadcaster, a move that follows the purchase of a 49% stake in Quintillion Business Media, another firm. Each of these entities will compete with Reliance’s media ventures. Both Mr Adani and Mr Ambani have announced plans to spend upwards of $70bn on energy projects encompassing batteries, hydrogen and solar power. To knit his expanding empire together, Mr Adani in August became a surprise bidder at the government’s auction of 5g bandwidth, a possible prelude to competing with Reliance in telecoms. Among Mr Adani’s industrial projects at Mundra is a refinery which will give Mr Ambani’s operations close by some competition.
Mr Adani began trading in diamonds in the 1980s. Metals and grains followed until he won the government concession to develop Mundra port. Begun in 1998, it now has a rail link and freight airport, as well as facilities allowing for shipments of petroleum, natural gas, aviation fuel, dry cargo and containers. In terms of traffic, the port ranks 26th globally. Mr Adani’s intention is for it to be the world’s largest by 2030. He has also acquired a dozen other smaller ports, and now controls 24% of the country’s capacity as well as 43% of container traffic and 50% of port revenues. Such expansion fits neatly with the government’s objectives for India to become an exporting powerhouse.
Other businesses often dovetail with existing operations. Adani-controlled entities import over a third of the country’s coal and transmit 22% of its electricity, much of it generated using coal but a growing amount from a network of solar farms. Its expanding warehouse operations hold 30% of the country’s grain. Seven airports, acquired in 2019, handle a quarter of India’s passenger traffic and a third of air freight. A vast empty field in an area known as Navi Mumbai is intended, within two years, to be the location of the city’s second airport. The other was one of those bought by the Adani group. Among other Adani ventures are 13 large road-construction projects in nine states and the acquisition of a controlling interest in Israel’s Haifa port, a potential stepping stone to trade across the Mediterranean. Last year, after a decade-long struggle, a combined mine, railway and port was completed in Australia, and coal is slowly starting to be exported to India.
A retail division includes 2,500 grocers and 8,700 electronics stores. Its 4,000 fashion outlets, in combination with an online operation, sold 430m garments in the past year. Dozens of big international retail companies in clothing, food and toys, hamstrung by India’s crippling regulations, have entered the country through joint ventures with Reliance. Those that have chosen to compete independently, notably Amazon and Walmart, are perpetually hamstrung by murky policies. A large media organisation includes three news networks, film production and a sizeable online financial portal.
In Reliance’s case, trading of textiles was followed by the production of textiles, then the manufacture of the polymers used in textiles and finally the production of the petrochemicals used to make those polymers. Refining, energy and petrochemical businesses accounted for 91% of revenues and 99% of profits as recently 2017. Since then Reliance has undergone a transformation. Jio, the firm’s telecoms arm, signed up its first customer in 2016 and now has 421m subscribers using its mobile network. That in turn is being used to create other new businesses such as providing access to computing at central hubs through the network.
Both firms have grown largely by building dominant positions in existing industries then moving into related areas
combined revenues of the companies controlled by Messrs Adani and Ambani are equivalent to 4% of India’s gdp.
Inside Hopin: How Europe’s Fastest Growing Start-Up Lost Its Way
Oscar Williams
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
Boufarhat moved to Switzerland, after investors allowed him to sell $195m of his own shares
If the project doesn’t work, says one of the former employees, “I think they’ll wrap up the events business, and then use their war chest to buy another profitable company and just pivot over to that… I think that’s why they’re not spending on salaries.”
As revenues for the virtual events product fall, Boufarhat has assigned his most valued employees to a new project focused on building a virtual community product, which is compared internally to Slack and Twitch.
In a recent all-hands meeting, staff from the finance team told employees that the reserves were large enough to sustain the company for another decade. Hopin was believed to have had around $600m in the bank as recently as three months ago, according to a venture capitalist who has not invested but has knowledge of Hopin’s finances
The decisions to lay off 12 per cent of staff in February, then a further 29 per cent this month, are widely believed to have been motivated by pressure from investors.
He once talked openly about how he dealt with pressure from investors. “Oh, that’s not a problem for me,” he said, according to an ex-employee who heard the exchange. “They just let me do what I want because, you know, we’re really successful so they know they can just stay out.”
Rather than basing the plan on market research, it would be determined in one of two ways. Either a customer would request a feature that the leadership team decided must be prioritised or managers would decide they wanted to copy a feature produced by a competitor
Revenues from its $250m acquisition of StreamYard, a live streaming service, have helped to offset the drop in revenue from its core product, but revenues from the non-core products are only growing slowly, two former insiders said.
As pandemic restrictions lifted and physical events returned, however, Hopin struggled to maintain engagement. The number of public events hosted on its Explore platform fell from 15,000 to just a few hundred. Client retention has dropped significantly, according to three former employees.
“Working at Hopin was probably the biggest waste of time in my career,” says the former employee
But earlier this month, as the appetite for virtual events continued to fall, Boufarhat decided to lay off 240 people, nearly a third of his staff. The chief operating, chief financial and chief business officers are among those who have left the company in recent weeks. There were job cuts in February as well
Last August, just over two years after its launch, the virtual events platform raised $450m at a valuation of $7.8bn, leading to it being named the fastest-growing start-up in Europe.
Switzerland and Pesticides: Toxic Relationship or Necessary Evil?
swissinfo.ch
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
Switzerland is managing to reduce the use of some types of pesticides in domestic agriculture, but it has not addressed imports, which is important to consider because most of Swiss residents’ plant-based calories (60%) come from abroad.
The toxicity profiles of pesticides fall on a wide spectrum and the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently classified them on their potential to do harm to humans. When we cross-referenced the WHO hazard classification against a list of 360 active substances approved in Switzerland, we found 170 matches.
However, the figures only cover the period from 2011-2015. More recent figures (up to 2018) compiled by the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) show Switzerland’s pesticide use to be 4.9 kilogrammes/hectare. This puts the country in the same boat as France and the UK (as well as Turkmenistan, Georgia, Argentina and the Dominican Republic). Once again, it’s neither among the top nor bottom nations when it comes to pesticide use.
The Green Party uses figures compiled by the 37-country Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to justify its claim. Those numbers do show that Switzerland is in the middle of pack when it comes to pesticide sales per unit of land.
Is Switzerland really an international laggard when it comes to the use of pesticides?
The anti-pesticide committee, based in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, is made up of scientists, legal experts and farmers with no direct ties to any major political party. However, the initiative has received some political backing, most notably from the Green Party, which argues that the Alpine country has not done enough to combat pesticide use.
On June 13, Swiss citizens will vote on an initiative that seeks to ban the use of pesticides in the country. The backers of the initiative want to make illegal the use of synthetic weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides in Switzerland’s agriculture sector as well as for private or commercial use. They also want to ban imports of such agents.
‘If You’re Going to Build Something From Scratch, This Might Be as Good a Time as in a Decade’
mckinsey.com
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
On crypto, there’s a moment of reckoning right now that I think is highly dependent on regulatory ambiguity and what happens in Washington. We’re kind of stuck until that is clarified.
I’m most motivated by all this stuff we’ve been talking about around hybrid and the fact that I can hire someone from around the globe instead of 20 miles from my office. Think about the productivity and innovation unlock that that might create. There are all kinds of problems that entrepreneurs need to solve. How do you get the serendipity back? How do you measure productivity? These kinds of Slack- and Zoom- next-generation things are super interesting to me. For instance, I would think that there should be some kind of new version of LinkedIn because of all this.
The other thing that has reinforced the Bay Area is that, culturally, everywhere you go, you run into someone connected to the industry. That creates a ton of serendipity outside the
office. It leads to companies being started and people changing jobs, and it leads to idea propagation. Matt Ridley talks about ideas having sex and how that can impact innovation and increase productivity. Silicon Valley is a great example of that.
The number-one risk of being outside the Valley was always, “Can I get the executive talent?” You could always get programmers. You could always get customer support people. Now, with hybrid, maybe you can get the executive talent, too. Found your company in Chicago and hire your executive talent even if they want to keep living in the Bay Area.
We’re running much smaller funds than some of our peers, who probably pull down ten times the capital we do each year. Those firms have massive management fees as a result. As an investor, I just take more pride in us doing well when our limited partners are doing well. So if the majority of our compensation is on the carry side instead of the fee side, I just feel better about it.
We had that on our mind as everyone in the Valley started expanding in more recent times. And I will tell you, for the six or seven years prior to the past year, people would meet with us and tell us that we were stupid, that we were leaving money on the table. But in the past six months, that’s all reverted. Now it’s all, oh, you guys are still brilliant.
We really try to learn from our mistakes. We tried to expand internationally once, but it didn’t work for us. So in about 2006, 2007, we capitulated and went back. And our conviction in our focus was even stronger, because we saw that we did better work once we refocused.
The Benchmark Way: Five Partners Who Make Other VC Firms Look Outgunned and Overstaffed
Forbes Editors' Picks
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
Andreessen Horowitz Conquered Venture Capital Without Breaking a Sweat. Gobbling Up the Rest of the World Won’t Be So Easy
Eric Newcomer
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
Special Report: How Paper Packaging Buyers Are Managing Procurement Risk
Patrick Cavanagh
12/26/2022, 9:40 PM
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