Indian startups have raised a record $11.3B this year
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I might be wrong but just thinking out loud.
For example: PhonePe app - It's just a payment transfer app by Flipkart (although it is much better than GPay, in terms of usage speed) - its current valuation is around 7-8B+ USD. I don't get the much reason. There are no intermediary charges as PhonePe uses UPI Payment Interface (https://www.npci.org.in/product-overview/upi-product-overvie...)
Profitability is still a very long way for most of these b2c startups
Zomato is locked to food & restaurants. See Swiggy, they have not locked themselves and expanded to many other Supply chain related businesses
Oyo, is like WeWork :)
Can you please share, any relevant or merchant integration link which says about transaction charges.
I don't think there are transactional charges, at least in beginning (I have not digged deep) but saying as per UPI.
UPI service is directly by banks (and government) (transfer from user's bank to merchant's bank without intermediary).
I can understand that very small transaction fees can be levied in future because PhonePe, Gpay may provide more business to these merchants as their user base grows.
Why I am saying very small? Unlike dispute resolution in PayPal kind of platform (which holds money) here it is much difficult to provide similar resolution to end-user, as payment is directly done to merchant.
But. It is B-2-B and B-2-B is mostly driven by trust, loyalty and partnerships, unlike end-users in India who runs after app providing new offer(s).
Such B-2-B business can change the end-user behaviour in terms of loyalty. So that may be it. But there are so many apps for same payment interface, and I can imagine that there can be just an app which helps merchant receive payment from end-user without any additional fees (0.0000).
If that is true, the valuations do make sense. If you can provide purchase power metrics for half a billion users, a $7B valuation might start to seem modest.
I think CRED is also doing the same.
The Indian consumer is very fickle and always shops for cheapest alternatives and looks for the best deals. I'm yet to see any kind of loyal behaviour, though, I must say, they prefer to trust only the bigger brands (in terms of presence) when they do occasionally spend big.
Another symptom is a lot of businesses acting like software startups riding the wave, when in reality, as a reductionist argument, could be simply classified as companies that get mobile and internet.
It also isn't uncommon for the business to exploit the low income wage structure to improve margins. Worker rights, contractor rights, in this gig economy is absent.
That's not to say some of these startups aren't delivering real value. They are... but race to the bottom seldom ends well for countries plagued with corruption, income inequality, and unemployment; and burderned with looming humanitarian crisis.
In my personal opinion, businesses serving other starups / enterprises (Zscaler, Cloudflare, Brex, Stripe, GitHub, slack, aws et al) remain the most secure of the current lot.
I don't think this disproportionate infusion of captial is going to end well: There do exist super valuable businesses but I highly doubt if they can justify their hype when they do go public. The investors are usually smart, but I hope they don't get dragged into hopeless optimism or become desperate.
Some engs and mgrs arguing the Indian market is better than Canada are overestimating their monetary gains and grossly underestimating the environmental, political, and societal benefits, imho.
PS Indian startup scene investments tracker: https://trak.in/india-startup-funding-investment-2015/
Salaries for top talent in Bengaluru are better than almost everywhere on earth except the US. While that may or may not last, the immigration process is still very painful and there are many more opportunities here than before.
Consider the conversation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107264
200k CAD is roughly comparable to 3 million INR in PPP terms, and that salary is for senior folks. Most senior engineers at Google Bangalore/Hyderabad or well established software companies are likely to make more than that.
Both might be considered to be salaries for remote offices of American companies or internationally funded startups. But if I look at the market in general, I’d rather be a software engineer in India than in Canada. The market is too big and the possibilities are too varied to ignore, even considering all the known problems (Canada might also have some of its own, I’m sure).
Paradoxically, US tourist visa was the easiest for all of us.
When I hear people complain about how the "Government prioritizes immigrants over the local people", it's just mind boggling how they come to this conclusion?
Source : Parents, siblings and I went to Canada for a trip. They applied in India and I applied abroad.
It's highly enraging and I agree with parent poster that birth country heavily restricts their movement even if they have the resources or are skilled.
At least in VN, you pay a broker a couple hundred to supply the paperwork and the deal is that if denied, the broker does the next attempt for free. We will just try again after her trip to the US. The whole point at least for Vietnamese is just to get a record of travel (and coming back) so that it makes it easier to get visas to other countries.
When I was consulting I spent half my being a product development/manager person because I needed to be.
So when there are specific jobs that have scarcity and salaries are raised, many managers literally have no experience with that and don't know how to hire in a competitive market.
The average quality of the Indian engineers (in banking), is unfortunately pretty abysmal.
The problem, I think, is their bias towards to hiring their own. Banking IT can become absolutely dominated by Indians, to the point where Indians can staff > 90% of IT positions in countries where they are a minority. The average quality of the Indians in there are pretty bad.
The difference can be seen clearly in companies that enforce some kind of diversity quota. The average quality of the Indians in there is noticeably higher by a wide margin. These companies are unfortunately a minority.
Even if you pay half the amount you pay avg (let's say 60K USD) in US, that will be very very good amount for an Indian living in India (30K USD/year is very good for living in India).
So, if you expect good work and don't want to pay even the amount which is equivalent to what an entry-level developer in US might get, then you will never get good developers.
Developers from the Ukraine are better, from experience.
Since there's a lot of investment going on, by startups and giants like Google, Apple, Amazon etc who are hiring a lot in India, it is difficult to get good devs easily because devs will see few things even before trying for interview,like
1. Company's product and how it aligns with their perspective 2. Brand 3. Monetary value
(not in any order)
And these companies will keep on paying large amount of money because it will still be cheaper than what they pay in US. These giants will give a brand recognition. And as we all know, these companies have amazing/challenging work too.
So smart talent gets occupied and is hard to snatch from such giants.
And they went on with their own SAAS application. The difference was the CEO was was doing the project managers work and tested everything himselve.
The other teams were constantly saying yes, but execution lacked severally.
So yes in their context meant: we heard you, not we understood you.
I am trying to keep tabs on electric two-wheeler startup industry in India. Ather energy is emerging as a big name. Anyone knows how they are doing?
Indians are no more foodies than the Americans or the Italians or the Japanese. Food is a central aspect of basically all cultures.
I’ve met people that go to a big city and stick with eating from the chains they know from home. They like eating, but they wouldn’t fall under foodie, as opposed to someone who is researching different types of food or cooking them and using various spices and ingredients to add flavor.
There is something about the term “Foodie” that bothers me because it’s such a general thing that applies to 7 billion people in the world.
I can understand if a person is a musician or a doctor or something substantial they’d have to do to attain that title. What do you think of the term “Chef” or a “Cook” or a “Restaurant critic”? There is definitely more specificity.
Foodie is a bullshit term for people that like to eat good food - basically all 7 billion people. It bothers me because I am an air-breathing enthusiast or as they say it a “Breathie”. I have a discerning smell for breathing air from various countries.
most people in the world have very undiscerning palettes and many of those people absolutely would not be interested in trying new foods.
foodie is not a negative term, so nobody is bothered by it. and colloquially foodies are a distinctive group of people that have gravitated towards a set of foods outside of what's common their original culture/region.
if you live in a world where that's the default, congratulations. since thats not the default, you're the weird one.
Not to be argumentative, but I fail to understand how you think this applies to everyone. For example, recently me and some friends were looking for a place to eat. Search turned up an Ethiopian restaurant that sounded interesting (none of us had any familiarity w/ the cuisine). Most of the group wanted to go to try it, but one friend flatly refused- he would rather just go to a chain place. Which is fine, not everyone enjoys trying new things and would prefer comfort foods.
Me and another of the group ended up going to the Ethiopian place later, and while it was excellent if we had drug the reluctant friend along it wouldn't have been fun for him (no silverware, just the flatbread).
I get that you find the term irratating, as I think it is almost as annoying as 'maker', but foodie connotes more than just 'someone who enjoys food'. Foodie describes someone who makes a partial hobby out of the act of consuming food. I hate the term b/c English already has an appropriated term that describes this better- gourmand. There is a difference between enjoying eating and being discerning about what one eats and being able to critique what is wrong/right with a dish.
Discerning taste? In other words conspicuous consumption. Foodies seek out whatever the hype is.
It's always interesting to me how self-described foodies seems to know very little about actual food. Ask a foodie to name their favorite recipes, about braising vs poaching, making a pan sauce, when blueberries are in season and they will likely not have much to say. Being a "foodie" is just a byword for consumerism. It's neither a skill or a hobby. It's just eating out.
Also, I wouldn’t disqualify anyone from being considered a foodie because they restrict their diet.
My wife had several colleagues complain to her that they wouldn't eat food if it were not for their girlfriends insistence.
If they are affordable such smartphones cost, electric vehicles are going to be popular and that will be breakthrough.
The foolish government keeps on increasing petrol price and squeeze blood out of peoples.
The other sectors which is mostly overlooked but just getting started are military startups. IMO this should also scale dramatically over the next decade.
This number might be a record but my prediction is that it would rapidly climb higher over the next decade or so.
Imagine how much new economic activity that is for a country whose GDP is only $2.5T
PPP is most useful when looking at domestically manufactured items and services. When looking at anything that needs to be imported, normal exchange rates are a much better tool. In fact due to import duties in India, many international goods are more expensive in India that in most of the west.
As shocking as it sounds, PPP multiple is really 18x
The multiplier again becomes 18x
From the chart you stated. Total, National currency units/US dollar, 2000 – 2018
I.e, in PPP terms 18 Rupees is one US Dollar.
In real terms, about 70 Rupees is one US dollar, given a PPP multiplier of slightly under 4 at current nominal exchange rates.
Not sure where you can draw a path to profitability from that.
There has certainly been a reddit-like quality infecting the discussions these past couple of years.
I don't know about India as I haven't been there in years but that certainly rings true to me as I reached the same conclusion while staying in many other countries around the world.
Repeat ad nauseam, everywhere in the country. India is more corrupt than a neodymium floppy disk.
The "unforced errors" were the death of 18-56 million Chinese in the Great Leap Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward.
The Cultural Revolution [1] "Millions of people were persecuted or suffered public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide. Many urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts or ransacked cultural and religious sites. " [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
A single party system led by a dictator for life was the cause of the errors in the past and is the situation in the present. There is a problem with mono-culture.
First theres human behavior into play, and consumerism. We have been changing a lot of our daily habits through time, because we now live much more in the digital realm, making a lot of phisical things less valuable. We are sharing more, using less goods made of plastic, wood, steel. Our relation to nature and the climate change will force us to rethink the way we behave, our consumerism, what we use and how we use it. The demand will probably drop also because we are making less babies..
For instance automation, AI, Solar, batteries, and 3d printing can make it cheaper to produce things in your home.
And if we still have the same industry in the future, China has a lot of people, and with the industrial park they have now, even with salaries getting higher, it would be not easy even for India to take that spot. This people are insanelly productive already.
Also, if they reach the next level, which is pure automation, it doesnt matter how cheap and productive other humans will be, it will never be enough.
The only way to take the spot from China now will be a industrial paradigm shift, and i gave some examples of how this may happen.
Predicting the future is really hard, and is hardly as linear as we are inclined to think. (For instance what would be of US without WWI & WWII or without the Russian revolution of 1917? Both are 'black swan' events no one can predict that changes everything we know)
(Please, pardon me for any broken english i have in this text)
we chant as we march to our death.
India is starting to boom now that climate crisis is getting worse.