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PayPal is shutting down its domestic business in India, less than four years after the American giant kickstarted local operations in the world’s second largest internet market.
“From 1 April 2021, we will focus all our attention on enabling more international sales for Indian businesses, and shift focus away from our domestic products in India. This means we will no longer offer domestic payment services within India from 1 April,” said a company spokesperson.
In a long statement, PayPal did not say why it was winding down its India business, but a report recently said the company, which has amassed over 360,000 merchants in the country, had failed to make inroads in India. .
Indian news outlet The Morning Context reported in December that PayPal was abandoning its local payments business in India, a claim the company had refuted at the time.
Nonetheless, the move comes as a surprise. The company said last year that it was building a payments service powered by India’s UPI railroad, suggesting the level of investments it was making in the country.
PayPal had also partnered with a range of popular Indian businesses such as ticketing services BookMyShow and MakeMyTrip and food delivery platform Swiggy to offer a faster check out experience. At the time of writing, PayPal website in India appears to have removed all such references.
India has emerged as one of the world’s largest battlegrounds for mobile payments firms in recent years. Scores of heavily-backed firms including Paytm, PhonePe, Google, Amazon, and Facebook are competing among one another to increase their share in India, where the market is estimated to be worth $1 trillion by 2023. Several of these firms also offer a range of payments services for merchants.
The company, which says it processed $1.4 billion worth of international sales for merchants in India last year, added that it will continue to invest in “product development that enables Indian businesses to reach nearly 350 million PayPal consumers worldwide, increase their sales internationally, and help the Indian economy return to growth.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/paypal-is-shutting-down-domestic-payments-business-in-india/
Kuaishou, a Chinese video app that’s largely underappreciated outside China, has just completed a massive initial public offering in Hong Kong. The app is by far the biggest rival for Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese version, and unlike many Western video platforms that make money from ads and subscriptions, Kuaishou’s cash cow is its tipping business.
Kuaishou’s shares opened in Hong Kong on Friday at HK$338 ($43.6) apiece, a 194% jump from its IPO price of HK$115 ($14.8). That catapults its market cap to nearly HK$1.4 trillion ($180 billion). The company pocketed approximately $5.4 billion from the listing with a total of 365,218,600 shares, excluding the overallotment option.
Kuaishou, which is backed by Tencent, now has a replenished coffer to invest in growth and hopefully work towards profitability. In the first nine months of 2020, the app posted an adjusted net loss of 7.2 billion yuan ($1.1 billion), compared to an adjusted profit of 1.8 billion yuan in the same period a year earlier.
Kuaishou’s stock is a huge hit with both institutional financiers and retail investors from China, many of whom are familiar with the app that boasted 481 million monthly users in the 11 months ended November. The app set a record as the most oversubscribed deal in Hong Kong, attracting retail investor demand totaling $164.8 billion, the South China Morning Post reported. Its share reached HK$322.8 on the gray market platform operated by Phillip Securities Group and HK$421 on online broker Futu Securities.
Like Douyin, Kuaishou began as a platform for people to create and share 15-second short videos (following a brief period as a GIF app) and later expanded into live streaming. The transition is natural, as creators who have built a name may seek further interaction with followers, and followers may want to express their loyalty and affection to creators. Live streaming and virtual gifting fill that need.
Kuaishou has three main monetization methods, with live streaming making up the majority of its revenue. Fifty-eight million users on Kuaishou spent on live videos monthly in the 11 months ended November, and on average every paying user brought 47.6 yuan ($7.36) in revenue.
The app also sells ads, with each user driving 71.4 yuan ($11) in marketing revenue for the period. Lastly, Kuaishou allows creators to hawk products. The gross merchandise value — an industry metric used loosely to measure e-commerce transactions — generated directly on Kuaishou reached 332.7 billion yuan ($51.4 billion) in the period.
For comparison, the live streaming feature on Alibaba’s Taobao bazaar generated over 400 billion yuan in GMV for the twelve months ended December.
While Kuaishou enjoys growing revenue from live streaming, regulatory risks loom in the background. The Chinese government has banned users under the age of 18 from purchasing virtual gifts. It has also urged platforms to put a cap on users’ monthly spending on virtual gifts, though regulators haven’t specified or suggested a limit.
Kuaishou is aware of the risk, noting in its prospectus that “any limits on user spending on virtual gifting ultimately imposed may negatively impact our revenues derived from virtual gifting and our results of operations.”
Until regulators take further action to rein in virtual gifting, Kuaishou will likely continue to thrive while it works on diversifying its business.
Democrats in the House voted to strip freshman Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of some of her responsibilities Thursday, citing her penchant for violent, extreme and at times anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Greene has expressed support for a range of alarming conspiracies, including the belief that the 2018 Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people was a “false flag.” That belief prompted two teachers unions to call for her removal from the House Education Committee — one of her new committee assignments.
The vote on a resolution to remove Greene from her committee assignments broke along party lines, with nearly all Republicans opposing the resolution to remove Greene. Some of her colleagues even voted in Greene’s defense in spite of condemning her behavior in the past.
As the House moved to vote on the highly unusual resolution, the new Georgia lawmaker claimed that her embrace of QAnon was in the past.
“I never once said during my entire campaign “QAnon,'” Greene said Thursday. “I never once said any of the things that I am being accused of today during my campaign. I never said any of these things since I have been elected for Congress. These were words of the past.”
But as the Daily Beast’s Will Sommer reported, a deleted tweet from December shows Greene explicitly defending QAnon and directing blame toward the media and “big tech.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed today that she hasn't promoted QAnon since being elected. But on Dec. 4, she praised an article promoting Q in a now-deleted tweet. The story Greene praised as "accurate" calls QAnon an "objective flow of information” that's "uniting Christians." pic.twitter.com/nN3bnTCyPa
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 4, 2021
In another recently-uncovered post from January 2019, Greene showed support for online comments calling for “a bullet to the head” for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and executing FBI agents.
Greene has also shared openly racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic views in Facebook videos, a track record that prompted Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to condemn her statements as “appalling” last June. More recently, McCarthy defended Greene against efforts to remove her from committees.
Greene was elected in November to represent a conservative district in northwest Georgia after her opponent Kevin Van Ausdal dropped out, citing personal reasons. Greene beat her opponent in the Republican primary in August, winning 57% of the vote.
QAnon, a dangerous once-fringe collection of conspiracy theories, was well-represented in January’s deadly Capitol riot and many photos from the day show the prevalence of QAnon symbols and sayings. In 2019, an FBI bulletin warned of QAnon’s connection to “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists.” A year later, at least one person who had espoused the same views would win a seat in Congress.
The overlap between Greene’s beliefs and those of the violent pro-Trump mob at the Capitol escalated tensions among lawmakers, many of whom feared for their lives as the assault unfolded.
A freshman representative with no apparent appetite for policy, Greene would wield little legislative power in the House. But as QAnon and related conspiracies move from the fringe to the mainstream and possibly back again — a trajectory largely dictated by the at times arbitrary decisions of social media companies — Greene’s treatment in Congress may signal what’s to come for a dangerous online movement that’s more than demonstrated its ability to spill over into real-world violence.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/04/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-congress-committees/
This probably falls under “good problems,” in the grand scheme of things. After another record quarter, Peloton has announced that it will invest more than $100 million in air and ocean freight deliveries due to “longer-than-acceptable wait times for the delivery of our products.”
The fitness company is among those tech firms that have seen a tremendous rise in interest amid the pandemic. In fact, it seems these days that VCs can’t pump money into at-home fitness solutions quickly enough to appease their interest. 2020 was a banner year for home workout solutions, from LuluLemon’s $500 million acquisition of Mirror to new platforms from Apple and Samsung.
In all, Peloton pulled in $1.06 billion in revenue last quarter, marking a more than 200% increase, year over year. The numbers beat Wall Street expectations and are showing no sign of slowing, with another massive quarter expected for the connected fitness brand.
The market did balk slightly at Peloton’s admission that, “While this investment will dampen our near-term profitability, improving our member experience is our first priority.” Clearly this big spend on reducing supply bottlenecks is a longer-term play.
Of course, it remains to be seen how the company’s earnings will stabilize after the pandemic. I’d anticipate there will be some slowing for Peloton and other brands when vaccines make returning to gyms a more widescale phenomenon. Still, home workouts — like remote work — may well be an aspect that is fundamentally transformed even with COVID-19 in the rearview.
NASA has awarded Firefly Aerospace a $93.3 million contract to take a lunar lander module loaded with experiments to the surface of the moon. While the company will not be performing the launch itself, it will be providing the spacecraft and “Blue Ghost” lander for the 2023 mission.
The space agency made the award as part of its ongoing Commercial Lunar Payload Services, under which several other non-prime space companies have been selected for similar work: Blue Origin, Astrobotic, Masten and so on.
This particular contract was first publicized to its CLPS partners back in September, which would have submitted bids for the project; Firefly clearly carried the day.
“We’re excited another CLPS provider has won its first task order award,” said NASA associate administrator for science Thomas Zurbuchen in a release announcing the contract. The last few years have seen many such firsts as NASA has increasingly embraced the commercial sector in providing everything from launch services to satellite and spacecraft manufacturing.
It’s not exactly Firefly’s first order from NASA, though: Its national security subsidiary Firefly Black (ominous) will be launching two cubesats for the Venture Class Launch Service Demo-2 mission. But this is larger and more complex by a huge margin (not to mention more expensive).
This will be the maiden lunar voyage for Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, which it’s been working on for the last few years in anticipation of renewed interest in the moon. It will hold the 10 scientific payloads, which NASA describes here, including a new laser reflector array and an experimental radiation-tolerant computer. There’s a lot to be loaded up, but Blue Ghost should have 50kg of space left over for anyone else who wants a ride to the moon.
Everything is going to Mare Crisium, a basin on the “light” or near side of the moon, where hopefully they will contribute valuable observations and experiments to inform future visits to and habitation on the moon.
Firefly will also be providing the spacecraft that will take the lander into lunar space, and will be responsible for getting it off the Earth in the first place — the company told me they’re evaluating options for that. By the time 2023 rolls around there should be plenty of rides to choose from, and indeed Firefly’s own Alpha launch vehicle may be flying by then, though it’s not ready to commit to a lunar insertion orbit mission today. The company plans to have its first Alpha flight in March.
