Namaste and welcome back to another edition of Business News for Kids (BNFK for short; genius isn’t it?). We’re big, like triple digit big 🎉🎉🎉. A big thank you to all of our 100 something subscribers. Our Revenues are sadly 0 😭. We realised we spoke a lot about Revenue in Edition #2, but we never asked..
Wait, what’s Revenue?! 🤣 Checkout the “Wait, what” section 👇
About BNFK
Knowledge is at the heart of being. To be more, you must know more.
With this weekly we distill the latest, most interesting, Business News 📰 .. to an emoji filled Newsletter for Kids. A dad 👽 & son 👾 experiment, delivered every Sunday.
If you’re forwarding this to someone (please please do), they can hit this 👇 to subscribe. It’s Free!!
Busy business this week 💼
Car companies are tailing Tesla 🐕 with Electric Vehicle (EV) competition heating up. Mercedes-Benz revealed their first ever electric car! It’s called Mercedes-Benz EQS 🚘 - and its sweet - no as sweet as in the concept car pic below in our Tech toys section, but good enough; while Ford says it now has a hands-free driving system to give Tesla’s Autonomous driving a challenge 🤷. You think they’ll get ‘em?
Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group that has interests in Telecom, Television, Airlines and a lot more, sold his shares worth $150 million in Space Tourism company Virgin Galactic. 🚀 Did you know that Space Tourism is likely to be just a $3 billion industry by 2030. But what might be interesting to think is.. what will it be like in 2100 👽 - there is talk of Space Hotels and more.
Citibank announced its closing its Retail banking business 🥵 in 13 countries including India and China! At a broad level, banks provide services to Companies, or to People like you and me. Services maybe similar - like giving Bank Accounts, or a Loan or a Credit card. Retail banking refers to services a bank provides to an individual person. With this move Citibank will stop offering Savings Bank Accounts, Credit Cards, and Loans 💰 to people. “Corporate” services to companies will continue. 🏢
Microsoft has acquired (bought) Speech AI company Nuance for $19.7 billion. Nuance specialises in understanding what someone says and “transcribing” it, i.e. converting it, to text. Their tech is used by Apple in Siri.. so next time you say Hey Siri.. you know whats helping Siri understand what you just said.
Epic Games, maker of Fornite 🤠, just raised $1 billion “to invest in the metaverse” while Canva, the creative technology company that helps people make marketing materials like advertising banners, presentations, product packaging and more, raised $71 million at a $15 billion valuation and is on track to make annualised Revenue of more than $500 million 🤑.
Wait, what is..
Revenue: In the most basic terms, Revenue is the amount of money a company makes. Revenue can be calculated Monthly or Annually (for the year). Sometimes you will hear that a company is on track for “annualised” Revenue of $X.. this simply means that ‘over the next one year’ they will make $X. But Revenue is not entirely that simple.. see the chart below:
Make a Revenue & profit statement for your Kitchen with Dad or a big person at home. 🍕🍟🍔
Robotics Process Automation 🤖: Sounds very complex, but is actually quite simple! Robotics Process Automation or RPA is nothing but the process of writing software that executes tasks automatically :) Space Tourism: Like tourism on earth, in the very near future, we the people, will go for holidays in space 🌌 - we’ll live in a space hotel, visit another planet or maybe just see Earth in all its glory. These travels will form the ‘Space Tourism’ industry. Venture Capitalist: A person or company that invests money in Private companies in return for an ownership in that company. Metaverse: The virtual world! Yes the internet has “worlds” of its own, with land, cities and so much more. These virtual worlds 🌆🌃 on the internet are called Metaverse. Cryptocurrency (refresher): Cryptocurrencies for e.g. Bitcoin are digital currency created, and owned, by the people. Usually currencies, be they $ or £ or ₹, are created by the Government of a country; for e.g. Bitcoins have been created by a person(s) rumoured to be known as Satoshi 🥷. They are not always considered to be a legal currency. Going IPO, Listing, Listed 💹 (refresher): Most companies begin life as a Private company. This simply means the Shares of the company are not bought and sold freely. When a company says they are going ‘public’ or that they are ‘listing’, this means that they are now making available their shares to be bought and sold by anyone in the public. Valuation: Simply put valuation is the value of a company. There are many things that go into deciding the valuation of a company, but most important bit used to calculate value is a multiple of the company’s Revenue or Profits before tax. Depending on what type of company it is, you can get 1x, 3x, 10x or 100x the value of Profits. Psst.. did you know Tesla is currently valued at a 1000x its Profits 🙇
Woah 😱 Weird 🥴
We give up. Seems we can’t decide whether the news we put here is Woah or Weird, so enjoy a new title again 😎 - now you can decide which is which! 😆
Neuralink, a company that develops wireless “brain-to-computer” hardware and related software interfaces will someday let you control a computer, with just your mind 🤯 - in a breakthrough, they made a monkey 🙊 do just that! It not only controlled the computer, but played a game 🎮 on it.. with just its brain 🧠.
Meet Melanie Perkins, our inspiring business person of this week.
Melanie Perkins is co-founder & CEO of Canva, the Australian graphics design technology company that we said above was worth $15 billion. She is one of the youngest female CEOs of a billion dollar startup. She alongwith her two co-founders started Canva when she was just 24 🔥. She is a figure skater ⛸ and a Kite surfer 🪁🏂! Read more about her here.
Coinbase, listed with a bang 💥 - the IPO was priced at $250, opened at $381 and shot up to $420, settling the day at $328. When a stock decides to go public or list, it decides a price at which it will sell its shares, in this case that price was $250. But after the stock lists and starts ‘trading’ i.e. people start buying and selling, the price of the stock fluctuates and is then decided by factors such as how many shares are being bought and sold. If more people want to buy the stock, its price goes up 📈 and if more people want to sell the stock it goes down 📉 .
Walmart owned Amazon India rival, Flipkart, is yet another Indian Unicorn eyeing an IPO. This one will apparently be a cool $35 billion one and list in India. Flipkart also acquired travel company Cleartrip.com for $40 million in a distress sale. Whats a distress sale? Discuss with Mom or a big person at home.
My dad insisted we put this section in here, even though I protested saying its going to be a while before kids need to apply mental models. Mental models are nothing but ways of thinking, you can use as a framework, to take decisions or solve problems. Who knows, they might just be useful!
Cost Benefit Analysis 😅 - A way to take a decision, basis the BENEFIT and/or COST of taking that decision.
Say you have two choices of the decisions you can make.🤷 You then think about the cost of both options, and the benefits of both options. If the benefits of one option outweigh the costs, you pick that option and run with it 🏃
If you feel like getting confused, read more here.
Tech, products, toys ++ 🤖
We wish the Mercedes EQS looked just like it’s concept (shown below) but well, reality bites when you take a car to production.. see the launched version here.
UPS is going green. It’s buying Electric Vertical Take-off Helicopters that will also make deliveries more efficient because of being able to take off and land ‘vertically’ in smaller spaces.
Pro Tip: The magic of learning is in curiosity. Don’t shy away from clicking those hyperlinked texts to read and learn more. We mostly hyperlink to text we have read ourselves to make sure it is safe, but please be aware that comments and ads shown on these pages are beyond our control. We recommend using a kids friendly browser to view the links.
Disclaimers: Please preview, review, and make sure to pass on only that content which you feel is appropriate for your kids. Stocks or cryptocurrencies covered are in no way a recommendation and shared only for news / information purposes. We have near zero expertise on investing, and it’s always good to know that Cryptocurrencies are a highly risky, and even illegal, investment in many markets :)
