Stories of the week
Reliance hightails its deal with Saudi Aramco, paving way for the internationalization
Yasir Al-Rumayyan, chairman of Saudi Aramco and the governor of the public investment fund, joined the board of Reliance as an independent director.
According to RIL's chairman Mukesh Ambani, the Reliance-Aramco's O2C deal shall be finalized by this year. This deal shall come as a great boon as the pandemic brought great challenges to the conglomerate's O2C business.
BharatPe, a 3-year-old startup gets a banking license in India
BharatPe, a digital platform that facilitates payment services to merchants, is soon going to be the half-owner of a bank.
The Reserve bank of India has given its approval to Centrum Financial Services Ltd. and BharatPe to set up a small finance bank(SFB) that will take over the hard-pressed Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative Bank (PMC Bank).
Note that Centrum Capital Ltd is a BSE listed entity, and its stock recorded almost 8% growth this week.
The partners shall infuse a fund of INR 180 crores into this SFB.
Global equity market update
Owing to Biden's $1tn infrastructure deal, S&P 500 observed the best week since Feb. The enacted bill hopes to invest in infrastructure to boost 1% in GDP by 2025-26. Though this week's data, showing core personal consumption expenditure in the US, hit 3.4 percent in the 12 months to May(its largest annual increase since 1992), investors struck on Biden's deal and relied on Fed's stand of this inflation being transitory.
Cryptocurrency update
China's crackdown on crypto mining activities bought the crypto market even further down than what it had been reduced to, by the Elon Musk fiasco in April.
This week, China banned all crypto mining activities from Sichuan province.
Note that Sichuan province is the 2nd largest crypto-mining region of China.
Additionally, China has also refrained from allowing the country's financial institutions to deal in cryptocurrencies.
Consequently, Bitcoin touched a low of $29000 this week.
Elon Musk also made it again in bitcoin controversies with his mean tweets against bitcoin maximalists.
Companies in focus
1. China's Didi - company which forced Uber out of China, plans to raise $4bn from IPO in NYSE
2. Amazon acquires encrypted messaging platform Wickr to support its work from home security need
2.Panasonic sold $3.6bn worth of its battery partner Tesla. Panasonic mentions that this would not change their relationship with Tesla.
Happy Reading!
Shubham Agarwal (CFA L2 Candidate | Incoming MBA candidate at University of Cambridge, UK)
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