Also in this letter:
■ Bullish on PhonePe, no call yet on Flipkart IPO: Walmart CEO
■ Ola Electric brings ex-LG Chem CEO on board for battery boost
■ End Facebook’s interference in India’s democracy: Sonia Gandhi
Construction materials startup Infra.Market faces tax probe
Business-to-business construction materials startup Infra.Market faces an investigation for allegedly not paying taxes, three people with direct knowledge of the development told us.
Driving the news: Income Tax officials have raided offices of the company in several cities, including Noida, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pune and Mumbai.
- “The founders’ homes were also raided,” one of the sources said. “There were some fake invoices and tax evasion noticed and investigation is being carried out for the same,” he added.
Company responds: In an emailed response to queries from ET, a spokesperson for the company said, “At Infra.Market, we give utmost importance to ensure we are in compliance with the law of the land at all times. The assertions in your mail are incorrect and misleading, [and] therefore, denied.”
“Tax authorities have raised certain queries due to non-filling of returns by certain suppliers and we are duly cooperating with them. However, we are legally bound not to publicly comment on it until further notice,” the spokesperson added.
Big picture: Corporate governance has been a niggling issue for many global and domestic risk investors, who have been struggling to make their portfolio companies compliant with laws and regulations. Companies such as BharatPe and Trell have been investigated in the recent past over alleged irregularities in their finances.
Bullish on PhonePe, no call yet on Flipkart IPO, says Walmart CEO
Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart Inc
Walmart Inc. CEO Doug McMillon said he’s buoyant about the prospects of digital payment firm PhonePe but not yet ready to talk about the listing of its parent firm Flipkart, which the retail giant acquired for $16 billion in 2018.
He described the global economy as “choppy, inconsistent, volatile” and said a recovery “is going to take time,” in a video-call interview with ET’s Bodhisatva Ganguli for the Economic Times Global Business Summit.
McMillon said he sees some easing of global supply chain disruptions with demand patterns returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Broader relationship with govt: McMillon said Walmart isn’t focused on the kind of omnichannel strategy it has elsewhere, when asked about the political debate in India over foreign direct investment, which is barred from multi-brand retail. The company wants a broader relationship with the government, he said, the idea being to bolster agriculture and neighbourhood stores.
Ola Electric brings ex-LG Chem CEO on board for battery boost
Prabhakar Patil
Ola Electric said on Wednesday it has appointed Prabhakar Patil, former chief executive officer of LG Chem Power, a leading lithium-ion cell maker, to the company’s board as it plans to manufacture its own batteries.
Cost saving: Currently, Ola Electric buys lithium-ion cells from foreign vendors and assembles them to make battery packs at its factory in Tamil Nadu. The battery pack is the most expensive component of an EV.
Ola Electric is among the 10 companies that have applied for the Indian government’s $2.4 billion production linked incentive (PLI) scheme to develop and manufacture batteries for EVs.
Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal said Ola Electric would set up a 50GWh cell manufacturing plant in India and that “Dr Prabhakar’s expertise will help us accelerate this process of bringing indigenously designed and manufactured cells to the market.”
The company also said that it is scouting the world for strategic investments in companies focused on advanced cell chemistry research and other battery technologies. These, it hopes, will help it offer better batteries for its upcoming vehicles.
The board: Prabhakar joins Aggarwal; Arun Sarin, former CEO, Vodafone Group; B V R Subbu, former president, Hyundai Motor India; Sumer Juneja, managing partner, SoftBank Vision Fund; Jaime Ardila Gomez, former executive VP and president of South America for General Motors; TVG Krishnamurthy on the company’s board.
Passenger EV sales jump: On March 8, we reported that the retail sale of passenger EVs has risen significantly over the past year. Sales of electric four-wheelers jumped 296% from 593 in February 2021 to 2,352 units in February 2022, while those of electric two-wheelers rose 433% from 6,083 to 32,443 units over over the same period, according to data from the Federation of Automobiles Dealers Association.
Also Read: Roadblocks on Bhavish Aggarwal’s way to building a super app for Ola
End Facebook’s interference in India’s democracy, says Sonia Gandhi
Congress president Sonia Gandhi urged the government to put an end to the alleged “systematic interference” of Facebook and other social media giants in India’s electoral politics.
In the Lok Sabha, Gandhi referred to a report published in Al Jazeera and The Reporters’ Collective claiming that Facebook had offered BJP cheaper deals for election ads as compared to other political parties.
Quote: “I urge the government to put an end to the systematic interference and influence of Facebook and other social media giants in the electoral politics of the world’s largest democracy. This is beyond partisan politics,” she said.
Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi also attacked social media giant Facebook and alleged that it was “worse for democracy”. Gandhi shared a compilation of news reports, accusing Facebook of helping the BJP reach out to voters during the elections.
“Meta-worse for democracy,” he wrote on Twitter.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son loses $25 billion in tech’s brutal winter
SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son
Masayoshi Son, SoftBank Group Corp.’s billionaire founder, checks the chart. Then again. Another time. And once more for good measure.
Lately it’s only moved in one direction: Up.
It’s not a chart of the firm’s stock picks. Those are sinking fast. So too is Son’s fortune — at $13.7 billion, it’s crashed $25 billion in the past year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The chart is SoftBank’s loan-to-value ratio, which Son says he checks four times a day. It’s key to how he staged his comeback over the past two decades after losing $70 billion during the dot-com crash.
The stock has tumbled almost 60% in the past year and the loan-to-value chart that Son obsesses over daily just keeps ticking higher, indicating SoftBank’s net debt is getting unwieldy relative to the equity value of its holdings. Some market watchers are flagging the risk of margin calls.
A winter storm: In February, he described SoftBank as being “in the middle of a winter storm” and announced a 1.55 trillion yen ($13 billion) decline to 19.3 trillion yen in the net value of the company’s assets for the three months through December.
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.
