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CarDekho raises $250 mn, becomes 31st Indian unicorn of 2021

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Car search platform CarDekho on Wednesday said it has raised $250 million, taking its valuation to $1.2 billion and becoming the 31st unicorn of 2021 in the country.

The fresh round of funding included $200 million Series E equity and $50 million debt in its pre-IPO round. The funding round was led by LeapFrog Investments, a global impact investor focused on financial services and healthcare access.

The company said it plans to expand across India with retail hubs that will focus on both used car buying and certified pre-owned car retail transactions with customers.

The CarDekho team is currently present in India, Indonesia and Philippines and aims to use the funds to expand internationally. The company’s auto and non-auto products are currently used in more than 30 countries globally.

“The new fundraise will help us expand our Used Car transactions and Financial services businesses. The trust and conviction of our investors will help us to accelerate our growth plans,” said Amit Jain, Co-founder and CEO, CarDekho.

CarDekho currently buys cars from customers in more than 100 markets and has a catalogue of more than 3,000 certified pre-owned cars for online purchase.

The company will expand its used car retail transactions business geographically and is set to increase its catalogue to 10,000 cars in the near future.

As CarDekho Group continues to scale, LeapFrog will support the company’s plans to deliver quality and affordable vehicles, insurance, and finance to millions of new emerging consumers. Improved mobility remains a proven driver of access to healthcare, education, and employment opportunities.

Other new investors who participated in the new funding round included the US based Canyon Partners, Mirae Asset and Harbor Spring Capital, along with existing investors Sequoia Capital India and Sunley House.

“CarDekho is making vehicles more accessible, affordable and trustworthy for over three million emerging consumers,” said Stewart Langdon, Partner and Co-Head of South Asian Investments, LeapFrog Investments.

India is adding at least three ‘unicorns’ per month in 2021. India is the third in the list of countries having the most unicorns, trailing the US and China, but ahead of the UK and Germany, as per a report by Hurun India.

Business

Indian telecom industry’s revenue doubled in 5 years, Bharti Airtel biggest gainer

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New Delhi, Dec 25: The revenue of India’s telecom industry increased 8 per cent (quarter-on-quarter) to Rs 674 billion (13 per cent growth year-on-year) in the second quarter of FY25, mainly driven by tariff hikes, according to a new report.

Driven by three rounds of smartphone tariff hikes, India’s quarterly telecom revenue has almost doubled (up 96 per cent) since September 2019, implying 14 per cent five-year industry revenue CAGR, according to the report by Motilal Oswal Financial Services Ltd.

Given the consolidated market structure in the Indian telecom industry, higher data consumption, lower ARPU, and inadequate returns generated by telcos, “we expect tariff hikes to be more frequent. We build in 15 per cent tariff hike in December 2025.”

The telecom industry’s average revenue per unit (ARPU) has almost doubled from Rs 98 in September 2019 to Rs 193 in September 2024, driven by tariff hikes.

However, as a result of sharp tariff hikes, the industry’s subscriber base at 1.15 trillion in September 2024 is lower than September 2019 levels (1.17 trillion).

Among telcos, Bharti Airtel has been the biggest beneficiary of tariff hikes with a 2.2 times increase in implied ARPU, registering a 17 per cent five-year CAGR.

“We believe the significant improvement in the data subs proportion has also been a key driver for Bharti’s industry-leading ARPU,” said the report.

Over the reporting period from 2019-2024, Bharti’s revenue has increased 2.6 times, implying 21 per cent five-year revenue CAGR, with incremental revenue market share significantly higher at 48 per cent.

“With Vi’s (Vodafone Idea) large capex plans, we believe the pace of market share gains may slow down. However, RJio and Bharti are still likely to continue gaining market share at Vi’s expense, in our view,” the report noted.

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AI to generate new revenue streams in 2025, innovate business processes: Experts

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New Delhi, Dec 25: Enterprises will reimagine business processes and value streams with AI agents in 2025, while taking into consideration the practical and ethical challenges, industry experts have said, adding that it will be the year of small language models, scaled reasoning and business value realisation.

In the coming year, AI agents will generate new revenue streams, innovate business processes across industries, boosting profitability, operational efficiency, and customer experience.

“Humans will increasingly take on roles where they set up agentic teams, plan agentic workflows, and validate work done by AI Agents,” said Sandhya Arun, Chief Technology Officer, Wipro.

According to Mohammed Rafee Tarafdar, CTO of Infosys, in 2025, we will see a lot of AI initiatives that are currently under rollout, to be scaled across enterprises, and businesses will start realising some measurable business value along the lines of cost, growth, better experience, and risk protection.

“We are seeing increased investments in scaling inferencing which improves the reasoning capabilities, thereby enabling the agentic systems to be used to eliminate tasks and re-engineer the processes,” Tarafdar mentioned.

As the small language models become more specialised and can deliver higher accuracy at lower cost, the adoption of these models in enterprises is likely to accelerate.

Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President and Managing Director, Adobe India, said that fuelled by a healthy enterprise business, vibrant creator community, and upcoming technological advancements, 2025 represents a year of extraordinary opportunity.

“We are committed to leading the way in harnessing generative AI’s potential responsibly and empower businesses and creators alike, setting new benchmarks in personalised customer experiences and content creation while upholding trust and transparency through our content authenticity programmes,” she noted.

The idea of software-defined capabilities, which originated with cloud technology, has now evolved across various machines like vehicles and robots.

“In 2025, software defined machines will be powered by AI and ML and make informed decisions. We will witness an increase in autonomous machines with over-the-air (OTA) updates,” added Arun.

Autonomous industrial robots will proliferate, and software-defined medical devices will evolve towards autonomous preventive maintenance and self-healing with minimal human intervention and down time.

Augmented analytics will enable citizen users to gain access to intelligent insights from ready-to-use data visualisations for faster and informed decision making. Data marketplaces will grow across industries and industry ecosystems to unlock new revenue streams, said experts.

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Indian firms raise bumper funds from equity market in 2024, set new records

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Mumbai, Dec 24: The year 2024 has been a historic one for the Indian stock market. Corporates raised bumper funds from investors through initial public offerings (IPOs), follow-on public offers (FPOs), qualified institutional placements (QIPs) and rights issues, and set several new records.

In 2024, domestic companies raised Rs 1.64 lakh crore through 90 IPOs.

During this period, shares worth Rs 1.39 lakh crore were sold to institutional investors. This is the highest figure ever for raising capital through public issues.

In 2021, companies raised the highest amount of Rs 1.18 lakh crore through IPOs. During this period, shares worth Rs 41,997 crore were sold by the companies to institutional investors.

So far this year, 20 companies have raised about Rs 18,000 crore through rights issues. Last year this figure was Rs 7,266 crore, and in 2022, it was Rs 3,884 crore.

Due to the boom in the IPO market, in December 2024, about 15 companies are going to raise Rs 25,500 crore through public issues.

The biggest-ever IPO of the Indian stock market was launched by Hyundai Motor India. Its issue size was Rs 27,870 crore.

Earlier, LIC’s public issue of Rs 21,008 crore in 2022 was the biggest IPO in the country so far. In 2024, Vibhor Steel Tube’s IPO received the highest subscription of 320 times. Apart from this, IPOs like KRN Heat Exchanger & Refrigeration, Manba Finance, and Gala Precision Engineering got more than 200 times subscriptions.

Indian firms raised Rs 1.4 lakh crore this year through QIPs, the highest figure so far since 2020.

This year, Vedanta and Zomato have each raised Rs 8,500 crore through QIP. Apart from this, Adani Energy Solutions and Varun Beverage raised Rs 8,373 crore and Rs 7,500 crore, respectively. According to data from the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL), foreign investors invested around $14 billion in the primary markets this year, which is more than the previous record of 2021.

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