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Tag: business

  • The selling of a private bond to Apollo Global nets the Mumbai airport $750 million

    Mumbai International Airport

    After delaying a scheduled note offering, Mumbai International Airport Ltd. has raised $750 million through a private bond sale to Apollo Global Management Inc.

    According to a stock exchange notification, the operator of India’s No. 2 airport, which is controlled by the country’s richest man, issued 7.25-year dollar notes to Apollo-managed funds to refinance current debt and fund new capital investment. The deal’s terms were not specified in the statement.

    Several Asian firms have revised their dent sale plans as a result of a worldwide bond market rout. Last month, Kalyan Jewellers India Ltd. announced the cancellation of a dollar bond offering, and India’s local currency debt market has experienced a slew of cancellations in recent months.

  • ZEPTO HAS RAISED $200 MN TO DEVELOP ITS 10-MINUTE DELIVERY SERVICE THROUGHOUT INDIA

    Zepto, a rapid commerce startup founded by two 19-year-old Stanford dropouts nine months ago, has raised $200 million in a Series D funding round, valuing the company at about $900 million. Zepto intends to use the funds to expand 10-minute grocery delivery across the country and continue to grow responsibly.

    Y Combinator Continuity doubled in and spearheaded rapid commerce Zepto’s Series D, with Kaiser Permanente joining the company as a new investor. All of the company’s previous investors have upped their stakes, including Nexus Venture Partners, Glade Brook Capital, and Lachy Groom, signaling yet another vote of confidence in the company’s prospects.

    The funding would also help Zepto compete with companies like Dunzo, Swiggy, Zomato, Amazon, and Flipkart, which are all spending big on the country’s quickly rising online food sector.

    “The core of what we’re doing is delivering groceries in 10 minutes,” said Zepto co-founder and CEO Aadit Palicha in an interview. “The way we do that is through a network of highly optimized delivery centers. We have scaled to millions of customers across the country. Today, we’re doing hundreds of thousands of orders a day. We have achieved a scale that took food delivery players years to achieve and we did that in a few months. The business continues to grow at a very fast pace.”

    According to Palicha, Zepto’s revenue increased by 800% QoQ (quarter-over-quarter), but burn decreased by 5X on a per-order basis. He claimed that at scale, the company had an 88-point NPS (net promoter score) and 60% Month-1 Buyer Retention.

    The company has secured $360 million in total from well-known investors in Silicon Valley and India. In just a few months, the company claims to have established an all-star bench of executive talent and expanded its team to over 1,000 individuals. The funds will allow it to continue hiring across all departments, including engineering, analytics, operations, marketing, finance, and human resources.

    What sets Zepto apart, according to the company, is its capacity to regularly supply over 3,000 products in under 10 minutes. The goal is to establish 10-minute delivery as the new standard.

  • The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) may go for a hike of up to 0.25 per cent in the reverse repo rate at which the RBI absorbs excess liquidity and leave the repo rate at which it lends, to narrow the policy rate corridor, a British brokerage said on Thursday.

    “Growth concerns amid spread of the Omicron variant and relatively benign inflation out-turns provide the RBI with enough room to maintain its growth-supportive monetary policies,” analysts at Barclays said, ahead of the resolution announcement next week.The RBI will hike the reverse repo rate by 0.20-0.25 per cent, given its liquidity management actions, it said.

    The brokerage joins a growing list of watchers expecting a reverse repo hike.

    Other analysts also blame the surprising hike in the government borrowing announced in the budget for the RBI’s likely call for policy normalisation.

    Barclays said the budget’s focus on capital expenditure is expected to provide a back-loaded fiscal impulse to the economy and does not change the macro backdrop, which includes concerns on inflation.

    On the surging global oil prices, which generally play into domestic inflation through corresponding price hikes of fuels locally, the brokerage said the inflationary pressures are unlikely to rise before the state elections finish by March, hinting of no pass-through.

    Even though the inflation is benign lately, the RBI needs to be vigilant, it said, pointing to its own forecasts suggesting the headline number staying in the upper end of the 2-6 per cent band and also the crude prices moving higher.

    It said till now, the liquidity signals from the RBI have been mixed, which have included shelving of the bond purchasing programme GSAP, an increase in both the quantum and cut-offs for voluntary reverse repo rate auctions and some bond sales in the secondary market last month.

    The policy guidance will be dovish when compared to RBI’s global peers who have been guiding or announcing rates hikes as inflations become into a concern, it said, adding that inflation in India should trend lower through 2022.