1 important thing: The long wait is over! The much-awaited financial results of India's most-valued startup, Byju's, are finally due tomorrow, after a year-long delay.

• The reported revenues are likely to see a deviation from the projected revenues due to changes in accounting policy.
• Deloitte is also learnt to have flagged off lack of adequate controls and systems.
• Byju's has struggled since the beginning of this year. While the company's revenue is seen increasing in FY21, its losses are expected to widen, thanks to its high customer acquisition cost.

In today's newsletter:

• Ola Electric rejigs org, again
• Flipkart, Amazon prepare for festive faceoff
• HCL Tech lays off, Infy bans moonlighting

Bonus: We have a great book recommendation about a company that has been an integral part of all our lives for the past 17 years. Scroll below for more deets!

Bhavish Aggarwal-led Ola Electric can't stop pressing its refresh button! The firm has announced another restructuring and reorg plan with new global and India heads.

Vinay Bhopatkar, who was leading the company's sales; Arvind Appi Raj, the director of the environment, health and safety team, and director Vijayanand Harish have resigned from the organization, joining a long list of executives who have left the firm in the last six months.

The main reason for the rejig is to centralize and unify operations across verticals, an Ola Electric spokesperson tells us.

As part of the new restructuring, industry veteran YS Kim will take on an expanded role of leading sales, direct-to-consumer (D2C), and charging network.

Prashantha Subrahmanya Galagali, previously with Mahindra Electric Mobility, has joined as the Head of Supplier Quality Assurance, while Ramkripa Ananthan, formerly the chief of design at Mahindra and Mahindra will now head Ola Electric's design function.

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It's that time of the year again. In a few weeks, we will likely see a faceoff between two arch-rivals - Amazon and Flipkart - as they jostle to gain an upper hand in the crucial festive season.

• This time of year is particularly significant for the industry because consumers are more willing to spend money on festive shopping and because e-commerce companies are able to draw customers online with generous discounts and offers.

Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have both announced the start of their annual festive sales from September 23 to September 30.

Industry players and analysts will be closely watching how e-commerce platforms perform during the festive season this year due to concerns that inflation would reduce consumer demand and that online sales will decline as a result of increasing foot traffic at offline retailers.

Flipkart's 'Big Billion Days' and Amazon's 'Great Indian Festival' sales typically aggregate big bang discounts and offers across categories like fashion, cosmetics, electronics, home decor, appliances and others.

• The debut week of the season is likely to see a 24 percent rise in online sales at $5.9 billion as against $4.6 billion a year back, according to a Redseer report last week.

The festive season, which starts before Dussehra and lasts until Christmas in India, comprises almost 20 percent of the annual sales of these companies in the country, according to industry estimates.

We had earlier reported that buy now pay later players are expecting a banner festive season with as much as an 8X rise in disbursals compared to the same period last year despite regulatory hiccups.

• But the e-commerce duo is also eyeing a chunk of the credit bonanza. While Amazon Pay users will get a credit line of Rs 60,000, Flipkart Pay Later consumers can avail of Rs 1 lakh in credit.

Meanwhile, SoftBank-backed e-commerce player Meesho, which has emerged as a challenger to both Amazon and Flipkart, has also slotted its festive sales programme for the same period.

According to media reports, its performance during the sales will determine the company's fundraising trajectory in the near future as technology investors across the world have reduced their appetite for growth-stage businesses amid a period of global monetary tightening.

It is raining bad news in the IT sector. While HCL Technologies laid off around 350 employees on losing a contract with Microsoft, Infosys warned its employees against moonlighting.

Sources told us that after losing a contract for managing client Microsoft's news related products including MSN news platform, around 350 employees across several geographies including India were called on a town hall last week and laid off.

• The impacted employees were working in the content and editorial team and were on HCL's payroll. They are expected to get some severance pay with the last working day being September 30, 2022. 

Sources in the know of the matter said, Microsoft had recently shifted to using more automation on the platform and wasn't happy with the work quality of the HCL team.

• This move highlights the tough business environment that software services companies are currently seeing amidst macro uncertainties in key client markets like Europe and the US.

While Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji had termed moonlighting as 'cheating', Infosys has called it 'two-timing' and 'double lives' in an email it sent to employees, warning them to abstain from the practice.

Infosys' email warning isn't restricted just to what they do during business hours but outside it as well.

• It cites employment agreements which bars full-time or part-time work without Infy's consent. Any violation will lead to disciplinary action that also involves termination of employment.

Employees say that what they do outside of the work hours is strictly their prerogative, but experts agree on one thing: Moonlighting is here to stay and isn't going anywhere. Now, it's only a matter of both law and companies adapting to a new social trend.

Top IT companies are fighting hard to cut costs and retain employees, as clients relook at tech budgets. Facing margin pressures, TCS, Infosys and Wipro have already deferred and partially cut down on variable pay for the April-June quarter.

• While, Wipro had held back variable payout for middle- and senior level employees and Infosys will be paying an average of only 70 percent of the actual pay.

If you felt affording an electric vehicle today costs your kidney, here's some good news for you. EV financing companies are growing at a faster pace and it is believed that this will tackle one of the biggest dampener to EV growth and adoption in India.

Non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) in the EV financing space like RevFin, Akasa and Mufin Green are witnessing a 10 to 12-fold jump in deployments in the past 12 months. Not just that, investor interest in the segment is also increasing exponentially.

However, the financing option is getting very popular in the three-wheeler segment, while the two-wheeler segment is also growing.

Traditional banks and large NBFCs are staying very cautious of entering this segment and are just testing out the waters with tie-ups and partnerships with the EV finance companies.

Why, you ask? Risks are also high in terms of underwriting.

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• Nikhil Wahi, the brother of a former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi, has pleaded guilty to a wire fraud conspiracy charge in what is being termed as the first crypto insider trading case.

• Universal Music Group's virtual metaverse band, Kingship—which features characters based on Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT artwork—has tapped music producers that have created hits for superstars like Beyonce, Jay Z, and Bruno Mars. They will take the roles of co-executive producers and songwriters behind the Bored Ape band.

• Private equity giant KKR is reportedly planning to make a part of one of its funds available on the public blockchain, in a bid to expand individual investors' access to private investment vehicles.

Google's acquisition of YouTube is considered to be one of the smartest purchases of all time. But did you know the deal almost fell through at the last minute?

This nugget comes from the book "Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination" by the Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen which was released earlier this month.

The book chronicles the history of YouTube starting from 2005, its role in shaping internet culture, discovering and promoting talented YouTubers in its early years before the algorithms took over, and controversies with prominent creators such as PewDiePie that had led to mass advertiser boycotts from the platform among others.

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