Monday, September 9, 2019
Jack Ma to Step Down as Chairman: Alibaba Set for 'Big Challenge'
Realme 5 to go on sale today at 12PM through Flipkart, Realme website: Specs, price, and more
The Realme 5 is all set to go on sale in India again. The smartphone will be sold through Flipkart and Realme.com, starting at 12PM. Moreover, the smartphone maker has said that the Realme 5 smartphone will go on sale every Tuesday. Also, the company’s CEO Madhav Sheth has announced that the Realme 5 series will be made available offline by mid-September. For now, one can only purchase the devices from online stores.
Realme 5 specificationsThe Realme 5 features a 6.5-inch HD+ (720x1600 pixels) display. It comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3+ for protection. The smartphone is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 665 chipset, paired with up to 4GB RAM. It comes in three variants: 3GB RAM + 32GB storage, 4GB RAM + 64GB storage and 4GB RAM + 128GB storage variant. The device also has a microSD card slot for memory expansion up to 256GB. It runs Color OS 6.0 based on Android 9 Pie.
In the optics department, the Realme 5 sports a quad-camera setup: a 12MP primary camera (PDAF and an f/1.8 aperture) + an 8MP sensor (f/2.25 aperture and a 119-degree wide-angle lens), a 2MP macro lens (f/2.4 aperture and a 4cm focus distance), and a 2MP portrait lens (f/2.4 aperture). It has a 13MP selfie shooter as well. You can check out our camera samples here.
On the connectivity front, Realme 5 includes options for G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth v5.0, a GPS/ A-GPS, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a Micro-USB port. The smartphone packs a 5000mAh battery.
Realme 5 price in IndiaRealme 5 is priced at Rs 9,999 for the base 3GB RAM + 32GB storage variant. The smartphone costs Rs 10,499 for the 4GB RAM + 64GB storage model, and Rs 11,999 for the 4GB RAM + 128GB storage variant.
As mentioned above, the Realme 5 sale starts at 12PM today. It will be sold through Flipkart and Realme.com in Crystal Blue and Crystal Purple colour variants.
Realme 5 sale offersRealme is offering seven percent SuperCash worth Rs. 750 when paying using MobiKwik on Realme.com. Additionally, buyers will also be eligible for Jio benefits worth Rs 7,000. In contrast, Flipkart buyers will get a five percent instant discount when using an HDFC Bank credit card. There is also a five percent cashback for shoppers with Flipkart Axis Bank credit card.
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Jack Ma officially retires as Alibaba’s chairman
Jack Ma stepped down as Alibaba’s chairman today, handing the role over to the company’s current CEO Daniel Zhang. The transition was announced a year ago.
Ma will continue serving on Alibaba’s board until its annual general shareholders’ meeting next year. He also remains a lifetime partner of Alibaba Partnership, a group drawn from the senior management ranks of Alibaba Group companies and affiliates that has the right to nominate (and in some situations, appoint) up to simple majority of its board.
Ma said in last year’s announcement that he plans for his departure from Alibaba Group to be very gradual: “The one thing I can promise everyone is this: Alibaba was never about Jack Ma, but Jack Ma will forever belong to Alibaba.”
Ma left Alibaba’s CEO position in 2013 and was succeeded first by Jonathan Lu. In 2015 Lu was replaced by Zhang, the company’s former COO. As its CEO and now its chairman, Zhang has taken Alibaba’s reins as it copes with a slowdown in China’s e-commerce market after a decade of explosive growth. The online retail landscape also now includes new players like Pinduoduo, which have gained an advantage by focusing on smaller cities, important growth markets for Internet companies.
One interesting fact about the day Ma chose for his retirement as chairman is that it is Teachers’ Day in China. Ma is a former English teacher who is still nicknamed “Teacher Ma” and has said that he plans to devote time to education philanthropy.
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Paytm’s annual loss doubles to $549M
Running a payments business in India is not cheap. Just ask Paytm. One of India’s largest payment companies reported a net loss of Rs 3959 crore ($549 million) for the financial year that ended in March, up 165% over 1490 crore ($206 million) in the same period last year.
During the same period, the company’s revenue rose to Rs 3232 crore ($448 million), compared to Rs 3052 crore ($423 million) in the year before. The firm’s debt also surged to Rs 695 crore ($96 million), One97 Communications, the parent firm of Paytm, told investors in its annual report.
One97 Communications also runs an e-commerce business, which recently raised money from eBay, and Paytm Money, that runs mutual funds business. On a consolidated basis, the 9-year-old firm reported an annual loss of Rs 4217.20 crore ($584 million), up from Rs 1604.34 crore ($222 million) from the year before.
Indian news outlet BloombergQuint first reported (paywalled) the financial performance of Paytm.
The loss should worry Paytm, whose CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a conference last week that the firm would begin to work on going public in the next 22 to 24 months. The level of competition that Paytm faces today is only about to increase in the coming future, and unlike earlier, the Indian firm is not facing off financially weaker local rivals.
Paytm, which has raised over $2 billion to date from a range of investors including SoftBank, Alibaba, and Berkshire Hathaway, continues to be the largest mobile wallet app provider in India, but increasingly users are moving to government-backed UPI payments infrastructure. In UPI land, Paytm competes with Flipkart’s PhonePe and Google Pay, both of which are heavily-backed.
As of July, both PhonePe and Google Pay commanded a bigger market share across UPI apps than Paytm.
Also in UPI land, you don’t make money on each transaction. So lately, every payments firm in India, including Paytm, has expanded it offering to include financial services such as a credit card, or loan, or insurance.
In many ways, this has created a level playing field for payment firms that did not dominate the wallet business.
In a statement, Paytm said it has been investing $1 billion per year for the last two years to “expand payments ecosystem in our country.” The company plans to invest a further $3 billion in the next two years.
“We believe India is at the inflection point of digital payments and Paytm’s sole focus is towards solving the merchant payments and offering them financial services. We will invest Rs 20,000 crore ($2.7 billion) in the next two years towards achieving this,” a company spokesperson said.
The biggest challenge for Paytm and other UPI payment apps has yet to emerge. Before the end of this year, WhatsApp, which has over 400 million users in India, plans to offer UPI payment option to all its years in the coming month.
SoftBank mints QuintoAndar a new unicorn in Latin American real estate tech
QuintoAndar, the Brazilian real estate technology developer, has secured a massive $250 million Series D led by SoftBank, as the Japanese conglomerate continues to deploy its $5 billion commitment to the Latin American region.
QuintoAndar invented a marketplace that lets users search, book, rent and advertise rental properties in Brazil. The site manages listings and visits, transaction processing between tenants and landlords, and houses the digital contracts that bind these agreements together. QuintoAndar also developed a credit analysis system that negates the need for co-signers, deposits and rental insurance – barriers that have historically blocked deal flow in this industry.
Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Braga says QuintoAndar has now entered unicorn territory thanks to the SoftBank-led round. Dragoneer also participated, as well as return investors General Atlantic and Kaszek (which recently announced a fresh $600 million fund of its own).
QuintoAndar, which literally translates from Portuguese to English as “fifth floor,” is an example of a Brazilian startup solving Brazilian problems. Those seeking long-term rentals in big cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are throttled by bureaucratic policies that enforce expensive deposits, co-signer requirements and skyscraper-high insurance fees. On the supply side, amateur landlords are tunnel visioned on making money from transactions, creating a terrible customer service experience for tenants, along with wasted hours of apartment hunting. QuintoAndar is billing itself as a modernized fix that lets users search, book, rent and advertise rental properties in Brazil.
The startup, which has grown into a 1,000 person São Paulo-based operation has now amassed a total of $345 million to date, including a $64 million Series C led by General Atlantic that closed just nine months ago. Braga declined to confirm the exact valuation of QuintoAndar, but says that it has crossed the threshold of billion dollar status. The company was founded in 2013.
Why is this long term rentals startup accumulating so much capital? Brazilians are seeing home ownership as less of a long-term goal and are opting to rent, meaning more money in the bank and freedom to relocate. This, the founder believes, creates a big opportunity to make renting more efficient in a country where 62% of Brazilians are aged 29 or under, according to this review. Brazil’s population of 211,000,000 people has proven a hungry enough market for a startup like QuintoAndar to turn profitable, and to attract foreign investors like SoftBank. Co-founders André Penha and Braga were able to leverage these massive foreign investment checks to create a specific product to help generate liquidity for users in its home market.
Braga says the company doesn’t measure success by volume of users or its newly minted unicorn status, but by number of property visits carried out on QuintoAndar. The company is projecting over 2 million visits scheduled through its platform in 2019, and is seeing 4,500 contracts signed per month. The CEO attributes QuintoAndar’s popularity to its ease of use, and the fact that the renting service is generating liquidity for brokers and sellers in the Brazilian long term rentals market.
With the new funding, Braga intends to strengthen QuintoAndar’s userbase by acquiring new customers in more cities across Brazil. The company also intends to attract new talent and build out broker partnerships. In the long term, QuintoAndar envisions launching more financial products for its customers, and eventually using its suite of data to make recommendations for services like home renovations.
QuintoAndar now joins Nubank, Loggi, Gympass and Stone in the growing club of billion dollar Brazilian tech companies, but its founder is more interested in keeping the momentum going than celebrating entrance into the Latin American unicorn club. “I’m more focused on the long term mission that we have, and not overly excited about being a unicorn. Tomorrow’s another day, we have to keep working,” says Braga.
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