BC BUSINESS
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

1) Let's talk about how Alibaba has achieved the holy grail of big data - a holistic view of the consumer - through a plethora of product offerings and investment.

This is their overarching moat. And Amazon's got nothing on them.

 2) To the outsider, Alibaba's product range is confusing af. It's all over the place and there seems to be no core competency they are focusing on.

A few divisions - Taobao (B2C marketplace), Tmall (High-end B2C marketplace), Alibaba (B2B marketplace, Cainiu(logistics)..
3) ...Elema (Food delivery), Autonavi (maps), Youku (streaming) and Feizhu(travel booking)

Also the promotional strategy is weird, In the lead-up to singles day, half the time they were promoting some cat rearing in-app mini game.

Wtf?
4) When we view Alibaba's strategy as working to create a full view of a consumer's life, including their preferences, social network and spending capacity (and ability). Then everything starts to make sense.
4) Whether a consumer buys on Tmall or Taobao tells Ali about their preferences and budget, delivery address for packages and food lets Ali know where they live and where they work (also cross-referenced with property data to infer wealth level + occupation).
5) Maps and travel lets them know where the consumer frequents, how they travel (whether they have a car or take the subway), whether they buy discounted economy tickets to Hefei or first class seat to Bali.

The meta-data from all of this is staggering, but they aren't done yet
6) The last step is to know your social circle. Which they can infer from who you live with (via same delivery address), but cut off the WeChat social maps (see my Meituan thread about Ali versus Tencent beef), they need to figure out something better.

Enter the mini-games.
7) By playing the mini-games, players can unlock coupons for Singles day. But the biggest savings are when you invite your friends to play with you, all cats co-ordinating as a single team.

There was never a quicker way to find out who loves you enough to be cats with you
8) So no they know your preferences and social network, are we done? Of course not.

Enter two more important players in game - Ant and Weibo.

Former subsidary Ant offering payment, credit, insurance and asset management, but the payment data is the real gold.
9) One the payment data is augmented with Alibaba's (Ant has a data-sharing agreement with Alibaba for 50 years), Alibaba can see example the flow of transactions for a consumer's every day life, from salary to utilities payment.
10) This allows Alibaba and Ant to suggest relevant products to users that traditional algorithms would overlook. Take a university student, typically not the customer for credit loans since they are living on a budget.
11) But this particular one has made a series of high ticket purchases in Tmall, book frequent plane tickets to exotic locations and spends very little time comparing when making purchases.
12) Their payment linked to a family credit card and looking closr you can see substantial asset management products brought by the mum. This is some rich kid of instagram right here.

Ideal customer to offer high price items and credit products to.
13) Weibo (Chinese Twitter), who Alibaba holds 18% stake in, also shares data with Alibaba. This is galaxy brain level of data. Now Alibaba not only has historical traction but also future intent for the consumer. They now know what's hot and trending and then push relevant items
14) All in all, this makes Alibaba's recommendation engine for all products incredible powerful and on point. To a level that I find Amazon would struggle to compete with.

Or maybe I'm only saying that since I've developed a major Taobao habit.
15) It's interesting what the regulation on Ant will do. I'm very curious about the incoming data privacy regulations and how that will impact Alibaba's data moat. If you're interested on Ant, here's something I wrote a while back with @mariodgabriele https://t.co/VokvCT7sTN
I'll be doing threads like this for the rest of Jan, follow me to get these spams on your TL.

Let me know what you think!

More from Lillian Li

Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
"By creating the concept that data is a factor of production, China Inc. has formalised and legislated the stance that data itself is valuable rather than the algorithms it helps train.

The Chinese leadership has subtly but deftly implied that data's value to a nation is underpriced and currently subjected to market distortions."

I think China's making money moves in the area of data. Read about it
BABA
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about the question of 'how should we think about Chinese tech'

What do we talk about when we talk about Chinese tech? Who is 'we' here? How do you pronounce Elema?

I've hit 10k in followers and it's time to earn my stripes as a thinkboi.

2) Chinese tech is a loaded term. The very fact that we have to say 'Chinese' tech rather than tech demotes its otherness.

So what does a place of origin signify? The different market conditions, political context and imo most importantly, the development stage of the country.

3) I think @benedictevans and @ToniCowanBrown's podcast on 'How to think about Chinese tech when you know fa about China' (my title, not theirs), lays some of the groundwork here.

China's different market conditions and political context often means a parallel tech world

4) This means a fundamental rethinking of first principals that's hard to stomach for most Western tech folks
- Copy is not wrong, in fact, it shows you've picked a de-risked business model
- There are no unscalable resources, esp when labour is

5) But I think the most important factor that gets overlooked is that China tech demotes something very particular. It is coming from a developing country. The life stage of a country is different from its cultural context.

What happens when a developing country is innovating?
TECH
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Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about Tesla's China strategy. There's a few questions here - why did the Chinese government actively encourage them to set up in Shanghai? What's in it for Tesla? Why is Tesla continously discounting their cars?

Spoiler alert: $TSLA go brrr

2) Our story starts all the way back in 2013, when smog was so bad Beijing didn't see any blue sky for months. Policy pivots were in order, and new energy bills with specific support for electric vehicles (EV) were introduced.

3) Over the next few years subsidies from the government were handed out to any car companies that said they were going electric. A single EV could get up to $22k worth of subsidies (provided they could drive for 250 km).

Sales increased and the EV market steady grew

4) However at the end of 2017, there was no standout Chinese EV company. Far too much of the subsidies went to fraudsters and the Chinese EV market was lagging behind the EU market.

Chinese government hardened their resolve.

Similar to Baidu, complacency was a killer.

5) The aim was to have a thriving worldclass EV market in the long term.

Similar to how introducing Apple and Samsung brought up Xiaomi, One Plus and Oppo, they decided to introduce foreign competition from the best EV brand there was - Tesla.
TRADING
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about a key part of the Chinese creator economy. The creator management and incubator agencies known as Multi-Channel Networks (MCN). We''ll summerise key lessons for the western creator economy.

And know how Li Ziqi got her 12m YouTube subscribers

2) MCNs are modern-day talent agencies (but more) who target influencers and creators as their clients. It originated in the US but has proliferated in China, with industry estimates of 5k-7k Chinese MCN operating as of 2020.

3) Typically, as creators gain enough following, they find it difficult to be an-all-in-one content creator, editor, customer support rep, accountant, lawyer, and marketing guru that the job demands.

Enter the MCNs who offers the creator the following:

4) Audience and traffic growth, PR management, monetisation through ads & e-commerce and support with retail fulfillment.

Their services are more holistic than western MCNs, who's offerings are more domain-specific.

5) Agreements between Chinese MCNs and creators can get into guarantees of the number of followers provided, copyrights, subtitling and distribution help, as well as providing analytical feedback on their content.
ECONOMY
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about my favourite video platform Bilibili. What is it, what it isn't and and how it makes money. It's been called the Chinese YouTube that that framing lacks imaginary.

The $bili stock also 5x in 2020 - who knew weebs could be so lucrative

2) Grossly simplified, it's the Chinese equivalent of Youtube. Except it's not. It's like if Youtube, Twitch, Steam, Patreon, TokyoPop and Netflix had a CRISPR-baby, and that baby was a weeb, but that weeb is also super down with Chinese Gen Z

3) Bilibili was founded in 2010 by avid Anime, Gaming and Comics (AGC) fan Yi Xu from a frustration that the mainstay Chinese anime platform kept crashing with no consistent access to his beloved vocaloid Miku

4) Serial entrepreneur Rui Chen went from an angel investor to CEO, having obtained Yi Xu's trust by correctly identified the origin of Bilibili as from the anime "A Certain Scientific Railgun". Anime knowledge is life.

5) Currently it's the biggest mainstream portal for the Chinese Gen Z with user-generated video sharing, live streaming, mobile gaming, online comics and event ticketing. It’s also diversified its content coverage with coverage on beauty, e-sports, pop culture and many others.
TRADING

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Kostas on FIRE \U0001f525
Kostas on FIRE 🔥...
@itsKostasOnFIRE
The Mother of All Squeezes

How Volkswagen went from being on the brink of bankruptcy to the most valuable company in the world in two days

/THREAD/


1/ At the peak of the 2008 financial crisis, Volkswagen was considered a very likely candidate for bankruptcy.

Heavily indebted and already financially struggling before 2008, with car sales expected to plummet due to the ongoing global crisis.


2/ With GM and Chrysler filing for bankruptcy in 2009, shorting the VW stock would seem a safe bet.

If you are not familiar with stock shorts and short squeezes check my thread


3/ On October 26, 2008, Porsche announced it had increased its stake at VW from 30% to 74%.

This was a surprise to many who were led to believe that Porsche wasn't planning a takeover of VW, based on the company's announcements.


4/ Before the announcement, the short interest was approximately 13% of the outstanding shares, a number considered relatively low.

Porsche had a 30% stake, the Lower Saxony government fund held 20% of the shares, and another 5% was held by index funds.
BUSINESS
Chris Herd
Chris Herd
@chris_herd
I spoke to 5 global enterprises about remote work last week

Here’s what they told me about their plans for the future

[ a thread ] 💻🏠🌎

💰 Office space: All of them have $Billion real estate portfolios

All of them plan to cut it by atleast 50% and as much as 70%

📍 Talent Access: The thing they are most interested in is access to talent

Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of the office, they’ll hire the best person on the planet

📈 Efficiency: Their concern about remote work post-pandemic was that productivity would slip

It’s increased. They now know remote work works

🤔 Remote Dilemma: A big concern is losing their best people through not giving their teams what they want

Each company plans to let people work from home 60-100% of the time
BUSINESS
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Google workers have announced their intention to form a union, under the auspices of @CWAUnion Local 1440. The union is called @AlphabetWorkers (Google maintains the legal and accounting fiction that it is a division of a holding company called "Alphabet").

1/


Speaking of legal fictions, the union is opening membership to "TVCs" - temps, vendors and contractors - employees who have deliberately misclassified so as to avoid paying them benefits or extending normal workplace protections to them.

2/

It's a bold move, a countermeasure to thwart the other commercial advantage from worker misclassification: by creating multiple categories of workers, bosses can pit employees against one another, by dangling privileges in front of one group but not the other.

3/

But it comes at a high price: to gain official legal recognition, more than 50% of eligible workers must join the union. By including more workers, the union is setting a higher bar for official status.

But the union has momentum: a series of high-profile googler uprisings - driven by official tolerance for sexual misconduct, complicity in US military drone programs, secret collaboration with Chinese surveillance and censorship, and more - show how radicalized googlers are.

5/
BUSINESS
Sumit Grrg
Sumit Grrg
@sumitgrrg
I just read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 letters to Amazon shareholders. And here's a thread with just one key-takeaway from each of these letters.

So if you're an artist or an entrepreneur looking to get some insight into the mind of this genius, read this right now.


1997: Focus relentlessly on your customers and long-term growth.

1998: Here are the 3 criteria Bezos wants managers to consider when hiring (to set the bar high):

1. Will you admire this person?

2. Will they raise the average level of effectiveness of the group?

3. Along what dimension might this person be a superstar?

1999: How to think long-term? Think: it's good enough today, but it will get so much better.

2000: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.” - Benjamin Graham

We aren’t 10% smarter when the share goes 10% up, nor 10% dumber when it goes down. We want to be weighed, & we're always working to build a heavier company.
BUSINESS
Anurag Singh
Anurag Singh
@anuragsingh_as
#PolicybazaarIPO Long thread: There is monetary printing by RBI, there is lending by banks & finally there is the Indian IPO. “Foreign owned” company with ~1 Bn investment is selling “Indian” unicorn to “savvy” Indians for $ 6.2 Bn. Want to know how this printing works? Let’s go-

The basics: Rs 6017 Cr being raised by new shares (Rs 3750) & re-selling (Rs 2267). Face value Rs 2 offered at Rs ~1000 per share is one of a kind. Who decides the price? Examine the valuation ladder below.
With ~$ 150 Mn invested till 2017, we see $ 525 Mn rushes in after 2018


So, a company valued $1 Bn in 2018 & $ 1.5 Bn in 2019 by key investors like Tencent, suddenly “needs money” in March 2021. Falcon Edge “invests” all of $ 75 Mn in March at valuation of $ 2.65 Bn.
Enter IPO bankers a couple of months later & they value the company at $ 6.2 Bn

Why does PolicyBazaar need $ 75 Mn just 6 months before IPO & give away 2.5 times in returns? And it doesn’t even use that money as the B/S reflects appx Rs 1000 Cr in cash lying around.
What kind of a favor is that? Why do they need US investment bank for this just before IPO?

Notice 50% rise in shareholding of promotors here & a 1: 500 bonus share issue. After all, how do you print money & still keep share price at “reasonable” Rs 1000?
Without bonus issue in June 2021, each share would have costed Rs 50,000. Heard of circular valuation?
BUSINESS , POLICYBAZAAR

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Many readers have asked me "why do so many pulp covers feature women in ripped red blouses standing in swamps while a man fights off an unusual animal attack?"

The answer is artist Will Hulsey...


Will Hulsey was the undisputed king of the animal attack pulp cover. You name it, he'd paint it attacking you in a pool of stagnant water.


Very little is known about Will Hulsey, but he worked on a number of men's pulp magazines in the 1950s and early 1960s including Man's Life, True Men, Guilty, Trapped and Peril.


Their audience was ex-GIs: during WWII the US Council of Books in Wartime had given away over 122 million books to American servicemen to read; this led to a post-war surge in paperback and magazine sales amongst these newly enthusiastic readers.


As a result the 1950s saw a raft of men's pulp magazines being published to tap into this market - almost 200 different titles!
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Jijo Sunny
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1/ 👋 Excited to share what we’ve been building at https://t.co/GOQJ7LjQ2t + we are going to tweetstorm our progress every week!

Week 1 highlights: getting shortlisted for YC W2019🤞, acquiring a premium domain💰, meeting Substack's @hamishmckenzie and Stripe CEO @patrickc 🤩

2/ So what is Brew?

brew / bru : / to make (beer, coffee etc.) / verb: begin to develop 🌱

A place for you to enjoy premium content while supporting your favorite creators. Sort of like a ‘Consumer-facing Patreon’ cc @jackconte

(we’re still working on the pitch)

3/ So, why be so transparent? Two words: launch strategy.

jk 😅 a) I loooove doing something consistently for a long period of time b) limited downside and infinite upside (feedback, accountability, reach).
cc @altimor, @pmarca


4/ https://t.co/GOQJ7LjQ2t domain 🍻

It started with a cold email. Guess what? He was using BuyMeACoffee on his blog, and was excited to hear about what we're building next. Within 2w, we signed the deal at @Escrowcom's SF office. You’re a pleasure to work with @MichaelCyger!

5/ @ycombinator's invite for the in-person interview arrived that evening. Quite a day!

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UN Watch
UN Watch
@UNWatch
The UN just voted to condemn Israel 9 times, and the rest of the world 0.

View the resolutions and voting results here:

The resolution titled "The occupied Syrian Golan," which condemns Israel for "repressive measures" against Syrian citizens in the Golan Heights, was adopted by a vote of 151 - 2 - 14.

Israel and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/HoO7oz0dwr


The resolution titled "Israeli practices affecting the human rights of the Palestinian people..." was adopted by a vote of 153 - 6 - 9.

Australia, Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No' https://t.co/1Ntpi7Vqab


The resolution titled "Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan" was adopted by a vote of 153 – 5 – 10.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/REumYgyRuF


The resolution titled "Applicability of the Geneva Convention... to the
Occupied Palestinian Territory..." was adopted by a vote of 154 - 5 - 8.

Canada, Israel, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and the U.S. voted 'No'
https://t.co/xDAeS9K1kW
SOCIETY
Groww
Groww
@_groww
You want to buy a house.

You take a loan from the bank.

The bank asks you, “what if you don’t pay back?”

You say, “take my home and sell it”.

(Thread)

That makes sense. The bank gives you a loan and in case you don’t pay, the bank will take over your house and sell it and recover its money.

That’s collateral.

Banks also lend money to big corporations. With them, banks don’t always have collateral.

So a loan where the bank has collateral is considered safer for the bank.

In the early 2000s, the banks in the USA were giving out loans to people for buying houses.

The economy had just recovered from the tech bubble in 2000 where many banks had given out loans to businesses that had shut down.

In that backdrop, the banks found giving home loans safer.
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@HiteshAwasthi89
Bhu Varaha Swamy Temple

Bhu Varaha Swamy temple is a Hindu temple, located at Srimushnam, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Constructed in the Dravidian style of architecture...


the temple is dedicated to Varaha (Bhu Varaha Swamy), the boar-avatar of the god Vishnu and his consort Lakshmi as Ambujavalli Thayar.

The temple had contributions from Medieval Cholas of the 10th century with later expansions by Thanjavur Nayak king Achuthappa Nayak.


A granite wall surrounds the temple, enclosing all the shrines and the temple tanks. There is a seven-tieredrajagopuram, the temple’s gateway tower.

Six daily rituals and three yearly festivals are held at the temple, of which the Chariot festival....


celebrated during the Tamil month of Vaikasi (April–May), being the most prominent. The festival also symbolises Hindu-Muslim unity in the region – the flag of the chariot is provided by Muslims; they take offerings from the temple and present to Allah in the mosques.


Source & Pic credit : Anusri
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