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Hey there, welcome to a new edition of Sunday CET - let’s get right at it.

Dragos

Market talk

🇪🇺 Sixteen of the European Union’s biggest banks are ready to roll out Wero, a new way to pay that could finally allow customers to give up their Visa and Mastercard cards.

• service is seemingly up, namely a wallet providing instant money transfers on top of the said banks.

• still small, like a startup, and yet another money transfer service, un-differentiated but with an unfair competitive advantage - already has €500 million from its backers and a ready-made customer base from its banking shareholders.

• led by a lady who’s worked in management consulting most of her adult life.

• it’s an EU thing building an European <insert american big co> clone, in the works since 2020 and in an already hyper-competitive market with about 80 or so neo-banks operating transfers under an EMI license in Europe. So it’s complex and fluid.

• meanwhile, in the US, the government is suing Visa for being a monopoly.

🇩🇪 After losing a lawsuit in Germany, Meta says it’s never getting back together with Deutsche Telekom because the Germans are greedy and the Americans are from Facebook - or something.

🚄 The Spanish are pissed at the French as they cannot have their national operator Renfe able to provide connections to Paris, all while SNCF is running trains from France to Spain already.

🇬🇧 The British rich are inundating European tax advisers as they flee the UK for tax reasons.

🇭🇷 Meanwhile, in Croatia the government plans to start taxing second homes, such as holiday rentals along the Adriatic.

• almost every fourth family in Croatia owns a second home and some have a third, often rented to tourists during the season.

🇬🇧 Meta exec Nick Clegg said it was an odd choice for former British prime minister Rishi Sunak to hold a summit on AI safety instead of focusing on AI innovations.

🏂 Here’s a business strategy regular readers know I am interested in - a holding of ski resorts.

• that includes installations, hotels, spas or restaurants

• the resorts are sub-based members assets, on the premise that they are a premium product, and control demand with a high price, somehow similar to how professional sports is doing its pricing on their brand umbrellas (i.e. NBA).

• the downside is that the business is dependent on snow - so you need at least some glacier-based resorts, yet that may not always be enough - but since you’re geo spread, when one location is snow-poor, you compensate with snowy weather on the others.

• examples of such a companies are Vail or Alterra, both from US, which are market leaders in this space, producing some 3-4 billion in yearly turnover each.

• it looks like we’re at a point in the market where those guys ran out of resorts to buy in the States, so naturally their eyes are on Europe, where Vail already acquired Crans Montana and Andermatt…

• …and it is actively looking to buy more.

🇯🇵 Apparently being a money manager nowadays makes it fitting to compare yourself to Napoleon, Genghis Han or other history figures - just like Napoleon lost battles for his country, Masayoshi lost money for his LPs, I guess.

🇫🇷 A profile of Xavier Niel, who just launched a book.

💲 Numbers:

• OpenAI says its revenue will reach $11.6 billion next year, compared with an estimated $3.7 billion this year

• Starlink expects to pass the four million subscriber mark this week and to generate $6.6 billion in revenue this year.

  • amazing business - there are currently 6,426 Starlink satellites orbiting the Earth, of which 6,371 are operational.

  • also this week, Starlink made a deal for providing free internet on AirFrance flights.

• An American software company is being taken private by Blackstone and Vista in an all-cash deal worth $8.4B, representing an 8.1x LTM Revenue multiple - 40% premium to what it was trading at in public markets.

• Holiday e-commerce sales in November and December are estimated to grow more than 8% to $240.8 billion this year, up from $221.8 billion in 2023.

⚔️ Google filed an EU antitrust complaint against Microsoft’s abusive cloud practices.

☢️ A group of 14 global banks have expressed their support for the call to action to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.

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Quickies

⚠️ Smart investors follow the best intel sources to get a good grip of the Euro investment ecosystem. Join them, don’t miss out.

🗣️ Cheat sheets:

• fintech startups 

• defence startups

• American deals 

• summer zeitgeist

✍️ Readings:

• KKR published an Alternative Investments report.

• Sam Altman on the intelligence age.

• Taste is eating Silicon Valley.

💲 Times we live in:

• New York City Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on bribe allegations by a Turkish government official in the form of free flights on Turkish Airlines in exchange of Adams allowing Turkey to open a consulate in New York without a fire inspection.

🗣️ Just 24% of all bars, pubs and clubs in London are open past midnight on a Saturday night - that puts the city on a tenth place compared to other British cities.

• alas, in places like Zurich or Stockholm everything is empty past 10pm, making tourists and non-locals very dis-orientated. Otoh, tourists have become a problem in all big cities and them spending is not enough for the welfare of the agora since it is not sometimes good for the community, as a bar owner expertly explained to me over drinks in Amsterdam last night.

• on point though, it is true that it’s not easy to find late night establishments in London, as one would expect in a truly big city, but also keep in mind that it’s been less than 20 years since Britain had by law pub closing hours of 11pm. And Covid has changed things dramatically, economics are hard in the hospitality business, the country is in a terrible shape and so on.

• if this is not enough - pubs could be forced once again to cut their opening hours to tackle anti-social behaviour and improve health. Not a joke.

• and also true, while still one of my favourites in the world, London has had strange vibes lately - btw, have you seen that renewed idea of pedestrianising the stretch between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus?

🤯 The FBI is investigating an American venture firm over concerns of ties to Chinese government capital as well as sharing sensitive portfolio intel back to Beijing.

🇳🇴 One of Norway’s largest collections of Edvard Munch paintings is up for sale after its owner, Petter Olsen, was declared bankrupt.

🥸 Filmmaker James Cameron has joined the board of Stability AI, makers of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI model, because the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave to unlock new ways for artists to tell stories.

That’s all folks, have a wonderful week!

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