Also in this letter:
■ Maruti Suzuki hopes Indian govt will support ‘green’ tech beyond EVs
■ Softbank halves investments as portfolio takes a beating
■ Crypto exchange Zipmex suspends withdrawals
Meta’s internal study shows why many Indian women shun Facebook
On February 2, when Meta Platforms reported Facebook’s first ever quarterly drop in daily users, its finance chief said higher mobile data costs was one of the main reasons for its slowing growth in India, its biggest market.
On the same day, Meta posted the findings of its own research into Facebook’s business in India on an internal employee forum. The study, conducted over the two years to the end of 2021, identified different problems.
Safety fears, nudity and more: The internal study, a “high-level overview of the growth trends” in India, said a key problem Facebook had tried to fix for years in India, with limited success, was related to “gender imbalance”.
Many women have shunned the social network because they’re worried about their safety and privacy, according to Meta’s research, which is based on surveys of tens of thousands of people as well as Meta’s internal user data, and hasn’t been reported until now.
Men accounted for 75% of Facebook’s monthly active users in India last year. That compared with 62% of internet users more broadly in early 2020, the researchers found.
They also found that 79% of female Facebook users had “expressed concern about content/photo misuse”, while 20-30% of overall users were estimated to have seen nudity on the platform within the last seven days. In the US, this number was 10%.
Meta responds: A Meta spokesperson said the company regularly invested in internal research but added that “it’s misleading to characterise seven-month-old research as an accurate or comprehensive representation of the state of our business in India”.
Nonetheless, the main Indian issues detailed in the research were not cited by Meta’s chief financial officer, Dave Wehner, on the company’s February 2 call with analysts.
Significance: Facebook’s fortunes in India have broad implications for Meta, which has lost about half of its value this year amid a broader tech sell-off and faces scrutiny from investors and analysts who fear its growth in potentially high-growth developing markets is starting to wane.
“India contains more FB users than any other country,” said the research, which pegged the number at almost 450 million as of November 2021.
Maruti Suzuki hopes Indian govt will support ‘green’ tech beyond EVs
Maruti Suzuki, India’s top-selling carmaker, believes the government will show support for “green” car technology beyond full electric vehicles (EVs), such as hybrid, if it benefits the country, the company’s chief executive told Reuters.
Discrepancy: India’s taxes on hybrid cars range as high as 43%, compared to the low rate of 5% for EVs, which also stand to benefit from billions of dollars in incentives to companies that build them domestically.
Asked how talks with the government were progressing to secure lower taxes for hybrid cars, chief executive Hisashi Takeuchi said he thought government support would be forthcoming.
“The government’s support to EVs is good … to support some more green technology is even better,” he said. “I believe the government will support all technologies as far as they are good and contribute to a better India.”
Maruti has said it will not launch an all-electric model before 2025, and even then, Takeuchi said, its decarbonisation plans cover other clean technologies, such as compressed natural gas (CNG), bio fuels, flex fuel and hybrids.
Tiny market: In an interview to Bloomberg, Maruti Suzuki’s chairman RC Bhargava had said that electric vehicles aren’t the answer to reducing carbon emissions in India – at least not in the immediate future.
That’s partly because India’s shift to electric vehicles is much slower than other major markets like China and the US.
Arthur D Little estimates that by 2030, electric passenger cars will make up only about 5% of total EV sales.
Softbank halves investments as portfolio takes a beating
Masayoshi Son-led Softbank slashed its investments in the April-June quarter by half as tech stocks continued to be hammered worldwide owing to rising inflation, a liquidity crunch and bearish investor sentiment, reports Bloomberg.
Big fall: According to data compiled by Bloomberg, Softbank invested only $5.1 billion into 35 startups in April-June, compared to the $17.4 billion it poured into 70 startups in the same period last year. Its investments in China have also taken a hit, with the company investing in only two Chinese startups in June, down from six a year ago.
Liquidity issues: Softbank’s troubles are largely down to a liquidity shortfall as the company hasn’t been able to list some of its crown jewels — Arm and ByteDance.
ByteDance is currently trading at a valuation of $275 billion, down from its blended valuation of $460 billion in 2021.
The investment giant has had a turbulent year so far, having suffered a $26 billion loss in May and witnessing a couple of high-profile exits.
Tweet of the day
Crypto exchange Zipmex suspends withdrawals
Southeast Asia’s Zipmex became the latest crypto exchange to suspend withdrawals on Wednesday, citing volatile market conditions and rising difficulties in the crypto sector.
Since the collapse of terraUSD in May, many crypto exchanges and lenders have been struggling to stay afloat. Vauld, Celsius and Voyager Digital all suspended withdrawals or declared bankruptcy in the past couple of months, as has crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital.
Tesla dumps Bitcoin: In its Q2 earnings call, Tesla revealed that it had converted 75% of its Bitcoin holdings into fiat currency — adding $936 million of cash to its balance sheet. Chief executive Elon Musk said the sale was made to increase liquidity as Tesla was uncertain about how long covid lockdowns in China would continue.
Meanwhile, South Korean prosecutors conducted search and seizure operations at local crypto exchanges for their investigation into the collapse of terraUSD and its sister token Luna, which wiped out $60 billion of investor money and set off a chain of bankruptcies.
Microsoft Teams back online after global outage
Corporate employees across the world were off the hook a few hours earlier today as Microsoft’s Teams suffered a global outage, disrupting the workflows of thousands if not millions of users. The service, which has about 250 million monthly active users, was restored in a couple of hours.
Deets: Microsoft didn’t reveal the exact number of affected users. According to Downdetector.com, which analyses outages by compiling status updates from sources including user-submitted faults on its platform, over 4,800 customers reported facing issues with Teams.
Microsoft is currently probing the incident and, in a tweet, said,“ We’ve identified downstream impact to multiple Microsoft 365 services with Teams integration, such as Microsoft Word, Office Online and SharePoint Online. We’re providing updates for those services via MO402741 in the admin center or through status.office.com.”
Last October, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram suffered a six-hour outage that affected billions of users.
Today’s ETtech Top 5 newsletter was curated by Zaheer Merchant in Mumbai and Ruchir Vyas in New Delhi. Graphics and illustrations by Rahul Awasthi.
