Ordinary Abundance, and IndiaMart

“The curse of discipline is that every day looks the same. The curse of indiscipline is that every year does.” - Hemant Mohapatra

The Anti-Amazon: Costco is the anti-Amazon. It embodies the precise opposite of everything imagined by the e-commerce futurists—and yet somehow its revenue has grown by an average of more than 10 percent every year for the last five years... The low SKU count also allows Costco naturally to do something that Amazon does by squeezing suppliers: a low or even negative cash conversion cycle (CCC). The CCC is a corporate finance measure of how long it takes to turn inventory into cash through sales... But consumer preference is only one metric by which to judge the desirability of “assortment and home delivery” vs. “constraint and in-person shopping.” It should be remembered that the term “logistics” comes from a military context—the French word for the “art of moving, quartering, and supplying troops”—and logistical success in business means most fundamentally the success with which goods are supplied to the customers who need them.

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-anti-amazon/

What Does Nalanda Capital See in IndiaMart: I have read What I Learned About Investing from Darwin and created a Pulak Prasad lens to look at companies — the obsession with avoiding permanent loss before chasing gain, the refusal to forecast, the willingness to sit on a name for a decade and call that a strategy rather than an absence of one... It is not a subscription platform that has stopped growing. It is a classifieds monopoly — 8.8 million supplier storefronts, roughly 98,000 categories, and ownership of Indian industrial search intent that nobody has meaningfully attacked in twenty years. When a procurement manager in Ludhiana needs a gearbox supplier, the search does not go anywhere else. That position was built over two decades and cannot be bought. And then the part that I suspect is doing most of the work. Standalone fixed assets: ₹21 crore. Against ₹1,443 crore of revenue. Working capital: negative by ₹1,858 crore, because suppliers pay upfront for annual and multi-year contracts. The customers fund the business. No debt. ₹3,280 crore of cash and investments sitting on the balance sheet.

Ordinary Abundance: Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be “the limit of human felicity.” A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe. It is to humanity’s credit that we remain restless in the midst of all of this progress. We continue to look forward, pushing the frontier further with new treatments, new tools, and new institutions that will help future generations in ways we can’t even picture yet.

https://ordinaryabundance.com/