Also in this letter:
■ Tech hiring remains buoyant despite Omicron
■ Paytm shutting its consumer app in Canada
■ Tesla now accepts dogecoin for merch, says Musk
Delhivery’s Rs 7,460-crore IPO gets Sebi’s nod
Delhivery has received a go-ahead from the markets regulator for its Rs 7,460 crore initial public offering (IPO), people aware of the matter told us.
This makes the Gurugram-based company the first top-tier startup this year to have received clearance to go public.
Delhivery, which is backed by SoftBank and Carlyle, said in its draft IPO filing in November that it planned to raise Rs 5,000 crore by issuing new shares. The IPO will also include a Rs 2,460 crore offer-for-sale component, it said, in which existing investors will sell some of their shares.
These include private equity fund Carlyle, Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund and Times Internet, according to the filing. Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon and Suraj Saharan — who are among the five founders of Delhivery — will also sell shares in the OFS. (Disclosure: Times Internet is part of the Times Group, which also owns ETtech.)
Pre-IPO round: Delhivery raised $125 million in September from Addition, the new fund set up by Lee Fixel, former partner at New York-based investment firm Tiger Global. A portion of this was through a secondary purchase of shares from China’s Fosun. The Chinese fund sold 1.32% of its 3.8% stake in Delhivery, which was valued at $4 billion after the transaction.
How’s business? The company has seen its revenues jump significantly amid the pandemic.
It reported revenue of Rs 3,646.5 crore in FY21 compared to Rs 2,780 crore the previous year. In FY21, its net loss was Rs 415.7 crore against Rs 269 crore in FY20. For the quarter ending June 2021, Delhivery’s revenue was at Rs 1,317 crore with a loss of over Rs 129 crore during the same period.
For the first quarter ending June 30, 2021, the company saw its revenues grow to Rs 1,553.9 crore as against a loss of Rs 190.2 crore for the same period, its draft prospectus showed.
Tech hiring remains buoyant despite Omicron
Hiring in India’s tech sector remains buoyant, undeterred by the steep rise in Covid cases.
Driving the news: In the first week of 2022, the sector put out more than 70,000 active job openings, according to data from LinkedIn put together for ET by specialist staffing firm Xpheno.
Top companies with fresh job postings in the first week of the month included Accenture, IBM, Genpact, Dell, Zensar, Salesforce and Oracle, showed the data.
This is despite the first few days of the new year typically being a slow period. If the current hiring rate is sustained for the rest of January, the number of open job positions is likely to cross December’s figure of 253,000, thus making it the strongest in over two years, according to Xpheno estimates.
Minimal impact: Top technology company executives said they expect a “minimal impact” on their hiring plans as clients across sectors continue to accelerate their digitisation drive to enhance productivity and save costs.
“In spite of an increasing threat of Omicron, 2022 has begun on a positive note for hiring action,” Xpheno cofounder Kamal Karanth said. “Considering the Jan-Mar quarter is generally a buoyant quarter for jobs, the action in IT hiring may not slow down any time soon,” he added.
The local unit of US multinational Oracle, which has seen a fourfold jump in hiring from last year, will be recruiting thousands this year in functions such as sales and service staff, solution engineers, enterprise architects and product development engineers.
“This is higher than last year and multi-fold more than the pre-pandemic period,” said Gunashekar Govindan, vice president, talent advisory, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific. “With the launch of our cloud regions in India — in Mumbai and Hyderabad — the demand has grown exponentially. We expect this trend to continue in the near future,” he added.
Apart from this, the top 10 Indian IT services players, including Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, HCL Technologies and Mindtree, will together hire about half a million people in the whole of FY22, factoring in attrition refill, according to Xpheno. These include about 200,000 new jobs by the end of this fiscal.
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ETtech Deals Digest
Here’s a look at the top funding deals of the week.
Paytm is shutting its consumer app in Canada
Digital payments major Paytm, owned by One97 Communications Ltd, has decided to shut down its Canada app on March 14, the company’s Canada business informed customers.
Quote: It said in a blog, “During these unprecedented times, we have had to make some tough business decisions. Unfortunately, as of March 14, 2022 the Paytm Canada App will be shutting down permanently. Effective January 14, 2022, we will be disabling scheduled payments and top-ups for Paytm Cash which includes EMT transfers, Canada Post and bank transfers.”
Paytm had launched its Canada division, called Paytm Labs Inc, back in 2014. Paytm Canada launched its bill payments rewards program for Canadian users in 2018.
Why? One97 Communications, Paytm’s parent firm, told ET the decision was taken to focus the efforts of Paytm Labs on opportunities in India.
In response to ET’s queries, a Paytm spokesperson confirmed that there were no layoffs expected with the shutting down of the consumer app in Canada.
Zomato shuts South Africa biz: Meanwhile, food delivery company Zomato has completed the process of shutting down its South Africa subsidiary effective this month.
The company initiated the process in November. In a filing with the BSE last year, Zomato said that Zomato SA didn’t have any active business operations and was not a material subsidiary, adding that the closure would not affect its turnover or revenue.
Clean-up exercise: The Gurugram-based company has shuttered almost all of its international subsidiaries including those in Singapore and the United Kingdom. In August, Zomato shuttered its US subsidiary and sold its stake in Nextable Inc. for $100,000.
According to its quarterly earnings report, filed in August 2021, it earned Rs 31 crore from the UAE and a few other international markets.
Dogecoin jumps 18% after Musk says Tesla will accept it for merch
Meme-based cryptocurrency dogecoin jumped 18% to above $0.2 today after Tesla chief Elon Musk said customers could now pay for Tesla merchandise with the meme coin.
What’s dogecoin? Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was invented by software engineers Billy Markus and Jackson Palmer in 2015 as a joke. It is now hugely popular with retail investors, thanks largely to Musk’s tweets, which caused its value to soar roughly 4,000% in 2021. His mid-December tweet saying the use of dogecoin would be allowed on a test basis had sent the cryptocurrency soaring more than 20%.
Also read: Twelve times Elon Musk moved markets in 2021
Dorsey’s Block to build open bitcoin mining system: Block Inc, formerly known as Square, is building a Bitcoin mining system, as the Jack Dorsey-led company looks to expand beyond its payments business and into new tech like blockchain.
Tell me more: In October, Dorsey said Block was considering building a bitcoin mining system based on custom silicon and open source for individuals and businesses worldwide.
In a tweet thread on Thursday, Block’s general manager for hardware, Thomas Templeton, laid out the company’s plans for building the mining system.
Today’s ETtech Top 5 newsletter was curated by Aditya Rangroo in New Delhi and Zaheer Merchant in Mumbai.
