Robocar Trouble

What’s Going On Here?

Didi filed to list on the stock market in an initial public offering (IPO) that could value the Chinese ride-hailing giant at $100 billion, and we, for one, welcome our automated overlords.

What Does This Mean?

Didi – which beat out Uber to claim ride-hailing dominance in China – emerged from the pandemic with a spring in its step: the company reportedly made $6.4 billion in revenue and $800 million in profit last quarter. That’s encouraged it to bring its IPO forward, in hopes of stepping up its push to make robotaxis a reality.

According to Bloomberg, the IPO could value Didi at between $70 and $100 billion – up from the $62 billion it fetched in a private funding round last year (tweet this). That’d be a huge windfall for SoftBank, Tencent, and, yep, Uber, which collectively own more than 40% of the company.

Why Should I Care?

For markets: Ride-hailing comes a full circle.
Uber owns 13% of Didi after having sold its Chinese ride-hailing business to the company in 2016. But of the two, Didi might be better value. It made almost $22 billion in revenue last year and a $1.6 billion loss, and even the highest mooted IPO valuation would only represent around 5x last year’s sales. Compare that to Uber, which is trading at around 8x last year’s sales even after losing almost four times as much money as Didi.

The bigger picture: The best is yet to come.
Didi’s won’t be the only barnstorming IPO this year: trading platform Robinhood – which has been riding the wave of meme stocks and stimulus check-boosted bank balances – is rumored to be targeting a $40 billion valuation in its own summer debut. In fact, it’s expected to be a blockbuster season overall: some analysts are estimating that US-listed IPOs could raise upward of $40 billion from June to August – a figure that’d eclipse last year’s record-setting $32 billion for the same period.

You might also like: How to tell an IPO blockbuster from an IPO flop.

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There’s One Real Estate Avenue Left To Explore

What’s Going On Here?

Commercial real estate has had a rough time of it in the last year.

Offices have been left empty as working from home became the new normal, and companies aren’t going to shell out for workspaces like they used to.

Shops, restaurants, and bars, meanwhile, have been hit hard by the lack of footfall, and there are more than a few vacant shop fronts on Main Street these days.

But the pandemic is proving to be a boon for one under-the-radar corner of the real estate market – one that’s seen growing demand and plenty of investment.

So that’s today’s Insight: why this corner of commercial real estate is going from strength to strength, and how you can get invested.

What’s Going On Here?

Tesla showed off its latest car – the Model S Plaid – at a flashy event late last week, and it’s fast. Really fast. Like, this has never happened to Tesla. Honest.

What Does This Mean?

Investors have known about the Model S Plaid for a while, but this was a chance for Tesla to really show off its performance. And it was worth showing off: the car can go from nought to 60 in under two seconds – faster than modern F1 cars – and has an estimated range of 390 miles. And since that pushes electric vehicle performance even further forward, Tesla’s innovations should bring the rest of the industry along for the ride.

Why Should I Care?

For markets: Tesla’s back, baby.
Tesla sells far more of its cheaper models than its expensive ones, but the latter make a big difference to the company’s profitability. That might be why Tesla announced it’d be upping the Model S Plaid’s mooted $120,000 price tag by $10,000. And considering it’s expecting to sell 1,000 a week next quarter, that translates to an annualized revenue rate – that is, if you applied the data across a whole year – of almost $7 billion. That’s especially significant when you remember that Tesla’s forecasted revenue for the year is $50 billion, and it could help reverse its stock’s bad run of form: it’s underperformed US stocks by 25% in 2021.

Zooming out: Bitcoin can’t catch a break.
Tesla recently dealt bitcoin a blow by announcing it’d no longer accept it as payment, and the OG cryptocurrency suffered another setback late last week: an influential regulator proposed classifying bitcoin as the riskiest of assets for banks to hold. The good news is that the proposal acknowledges banks can hold bitcoin, but the bad news is that it’d force them to have a potentially prohibitive amount of cash as backup: one dollar for every dollar’s worth of bitcoin.

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Robocar Trouble

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There’s One Real Estate Avenue Left To Explore

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Premature Acceleration

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