My weekend was filled with TIL (or “today I learned”) moments. Some of my favourites are:
1. Mickey Mouse will enter the public domain in 2024 2. The idea of Schrodinger's cat is not what you think it is 3. Byju’s has paid the BCCI even though it’s on a sticky wicket 4. India has four unicorns in the business-to-business (B2B) industrial space 5. Financial metrics like ‘average inventory days’ and ‘inventory turnover ratio’ reveal just as much as revenue and profit The last of those two are part of today’s story on Zetwerk. The five-year-old company, valued at $2.7 billion, helps defence, consumer, and infrastructure companies find small manufacturers to make components or finished goods like apparel. It’s one of a quartet of unicorns in the B2B space, with the others being Infra.Market, Of Business, and Moglix. Zetwerk started off as a supply-chain-software company in 2018 before pivoting to becoming a marketplace for fabricated components. It diversified into healthcare products and apparel 2020 and kitchen appliances and electronics in 2021.
Those moves did wonders as it claimed it turned profitable in July 2021 and entered the unicorn club at the end of the year. But it wasn’t done yet; not by a long shot. After all, as Zetwerk said when it became a unicorn, “Today is just day one. It’s the first ball of the first over of the first innings of the world cup…” And Zetwerk has been smashing it out of the park since then. In May this year, it switched from being a marketplace to becoming a manufacturer itself—of wearables. The following month it acquired an aerospace company. Then an oil and gas company, and then an auto-parts plant. However, if you think this story is about a unicorn, punch-drunk on VC money, buying up companies left, right, and centre, think again, the method behind Zetwerk’s seeming madness that has helped it close the revenue gap with the market leader, Of Business. Meanwhile, Gaurav Tyagi dives deeper into its finances. It’s a fascinating story about a sector that largely goes under the radar.
