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Also in this letter:
■ Musk sells Tesla shares worth $5B, days after Twitter poll
■ Wakefit raises $28 million and other done deals
■ Beijing likely to support metaverse, with caveats: Tencent
Indian consumers are spending almost five hours a day on mobile apps, report finds
The average smartphone user in India spent an average of 4.8 hours a day using various mobile apps in Q3 of 2021 (July-September), making Indians “among the most mobile-first consumers in the world”, according to a new report by App Annie.
The time Indians spend on mobile apps had been rising steadily before the pandemic hit, but began to skyrocket early last year when Covid and lockdowns became our collective reality. This meant that Indian consumers spent more than four hours a day on mobile apps for the first time in 2020, or a collective 651 billion hours for the year. That was a 40% jump from 2019, when Indians spent “just” 3.3 hours a day on apps.
In fact, the time spent every day using apps increased from under three hours in Q1 2019 to 4.6 hours in Q1 2021, a stunning 80% jump in two years.
Mobile gaming
India is the world’s top market for mobile gaming in terms of downloads across Android and iPhones. In the first half of 2021, Indian players installed 4.8 billion games, or one in every five installed globally, the report said.
The top game in this period, by downloads and active users, was Ludo King, a free-to-play title developed by Indian studio Gametion Technologies.
The report noted, however, that Ludo King, which was made in India, is something of an anomaly. Indian-made games barely figure in the country’s games charts, and just 7.6% of the top 1,000 games are made by Indian companies. “The situation is very different in other regions. In China, the homegrown ratio is 60%,” the report said.
Mobile payments
India is also setting the pace on mobile payments, the report said, largely thanks to UPI. The volume of UPI transactions doubled in a year to nearly 8 billion in Q2 2021. Earlier this month we reported that UPI transactions crossed $100 billion in value in a month for the first time in October.
This growth, the report said, has created a significant opportunity among developers to create apps for merchants. “According to our numbers, one of the market-leading products Khata Book had 14 million average smartphone monthly active users in India in Q2 2021,” it stated.
Others that have benefited from UPI are ‘buy now pay later’ and credit apps such as StashFin, Dhani, Kissht and Slice Super Card, which give consumers access to near-instant credit.
Click here to read other highlights from the report.
Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $5 billion after Twitter poll
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold shares in the company worth about $5 billion, he reported in filings today, just days after he asked his 63 million Twitter users whether he should sell 10% of his stake in the electric carmaker.
Details: In his first share sale since 2016, Musk’s trust sold nearly 3.6 million shares in Tesla, worth around $4 billion. He also sold another 934,000 shares for $1.1 billion after exercising options to acquire nearly 2.2 million shares.
The 4.5 million shares equate to about 3% of his total holdings in Tesla, which makes up the lion’s share of his estimated $281.6 billion fortune.
Yes, but: The documents showed that he had already made plans to sell about a fifth of the shares in September, long before he polled his Twitter followers, the BBC reported. However, the sale of the remaining four-fifths had not been scheduled, the filings showed.
Back story: On Saturday, Musk had asked his followers whether he should sell 10% of his stake in Tesla to meet tax obligations. “Much is made lately of unrealised gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” he tweeted, adding, “I will abide by the results of this poll, whichever way it goes.”
Musk has more than 20 million further stock options that are due to expire in August 2022.
SpaceX launches four into orbit: Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX and NASA launched four astronauts into orbit today, sending a veteran spacewalker, two younger crewmates chosen for future lunar missions and a German materials scientist to the International Space Station.
The flight marks the third “operational” space station crew sent to orbit aboard a Dragon capsule since NASA and SpaceX teamed up to resume space launches from American soil last year, following a nine-year hiatus at the end of the US space shuttle program in 2011.
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ETtech Done deals
■ Wakefit, a home and sleep solutions company has raised $28 million (Rs 200 crore) in a Series C funding round from investors led by US-based SIG, a global trading and investment firm headquartered in Pennsylvania. The funding round, in which existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Verlinvest also participated, values the company at over Rs 2,800 crore, senior company officials told us.
■ Cradlewise, a Silicon Valley-based startup that makes smart cribs for babies, has raised $7 million in a seed funding round led by early-stage venture capital firm Footwork. VC firm CRV participated in the fundraising, as did SOSV and Better Capital, and angels like Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake, Italic CEO Jeremy Cai and Molekule CTO Dilip Goswami.
■ CapGrid, a B2B commerce startup specialising in sourcing and procurement of direct-material supplies, has raised Rs 4.1 crore seed funding from Anicut Angel Fund, Axilor Ventures and Firstcheque. The B2B startup plans to leverage the new funds to boost product innovation, scale operations, and expand its team.
■ Exotel, a cloud telephony firm, has acquired chatbot developer Cogno AI in a cash-and-stock deal, as part of its plans to build a complete customer engagement platform. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Cogno AI is Exotel’s second M&A deal since absorbing Ameyo in June. The company had raised $35 million in a Series C funding round in September.
■ Capital A, a venture fund for seed to early-stage start-ups, on Thursday said it has invested in Bengaluru-based B2B logistics-tech startup RoaDo, its maiden investment from its proprietary corpus of $25 million (about Rs 186.2 crore). It did not disclose the amount invested.
Tencent says Beijing likely to support metaverse, with conditions
Chinese social media giant Tencent Holdings expects Beijing to allow ‘metaverse’ virtual environment services to operate in China — provided they fall in line with Chinese rules.
Chinese metaverse? In some of its first public comments on the metaverse, Tencent, China’s biggest company by market value, welcomed the potential for gaming business opportunities in a post-earnings call but acknowledged China’s version of the metaverse would need to be different from the rest of the world’s.
Also read: What is the metaverse and why is everyone talking about it?
Quote: “The Chinese government will be in support of the development of such technologies as long as the user experience is actually provided under the regulatory framework,” Tencent president Martin Lau said.
Investors have poured over the prospects for the burgeoning virtual reality world ever since Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, which recently changed its name to Meta Platforms Inc, announced that he would devote the future of his company to building the metaverse.
The great firewall of China: Amid the metaverse fervour, questions have been raised among tech investors about how it might evolve in China, where the internet is tightly censored and authorities have waged a crackdown against its once free-wheeling giants, including Tencent, since last year.
Disney’s happy place in the metaverse: Walt Disney CEO Bob Chapek said the entertainment conglomerate is preparing to make the technological leap into a virtual reality world first imagined by science fiction writers.
Disney’s plan was notably devoid of specifics, beyond dropping a buzzword that has animated Silicon Valley.
- “Our efforts to date are merely a prologue to a time when we’ll be able to connect the physical and digital worlds even more closely, allowing for storytelling, without boundaries in our own Disney Metaverse,” Chapek said.
In an interview with CNBC, Chapek said he envisions it as an extension of streaming video service Disney+ through the “three-dimensional canvas” he envisions for new types of storytelling.
Didi prepares to relaunch apps in China, anticipates probe will end soon
Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global Inc. is preparing to reintroduce its apps in China by the end of the year as regulators wrap up their probe into the company, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Potential penalty: Beijing is expected to finalise any penalties for the ride-hailing company by December. The company has set aside 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) for a potential fine.
What happened: In July, the powerful Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) ordered app stores to remove 25 mobile apps operated by Didi just days after the ride-hailing giant listed in New York. It also told the company to stop registering new users, citing national security and the public interest.
Company’s response: Didi said the information obtained by Reuters was “pure hearsay with no grounds in fact” and that it was cooperating actively and fully with the cybersecurity review.
Tell me more: Didi ran afoul of the CAC when it pressed ahead with its New York listing on June 30, even though the regulator had urged the company to put it on hold while a cybersecurity review of its data practices was conducted.
Soon after, the CAC launched an investigation into Didi over its collection and use of personal data. It said data had been collected illegally and the apps concerned included those for its delivery service, camera device and finance services.
Didi responded at the time by saying it had stopped registering new users and would make changes to comply with rules on national security and personal data protection, and would protect users’ rights.
Today’s ETtech Top 5 newsletter was curated by Arun Padmanabhan in New Delhi and Zaheer Merchant in Mumbai. Graphics and illustrations by Rahul Awasthi.
