Read this Tuesday’s edition of the FolhaMercado newsletter (11) – 04/11/2023 – Market

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The Tupperware Crisis

Shares of Tupperware –yes, the company that makes the traditional plastic pots you should have at home– fell 48% this Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.

• The backlash came after the company said “there are substantial doubts about its ability to continue operating”.

Understand the crisis: the company said on Friday that the triggers for the early maturity of its debts (covenants) may be activated after it delayed the disclosure of its balance sheet and also registered problems in the cash flow.

• The company also stated that, if it does not get a new capital injection or a renegotiation of its debts, it may run out of liquidity in the short term.

• Your liability revolves around $700 million, while its market value is $55 million.

• In addition to trying to renegotiate debts, Tupperware says it is reviewing its personnel and property structures.

• Sales of its pots skyrocketed during the pandemic, when people cooked more at home. At the end of 2020, the company was valued at US$ 1 billion.

• The problem was that she believed that the demand for her plastic packaging would continue in the same way after the health crisis.

Founded in 1946in the US, the company arrived in Brazil in 1976 and its products ended up becoming so popular that they became a generic name for any plastic pot with a lid.

• As this report from the Sheetthe Brazilian’s relationship with abundance at the table may be at the root of a serious and jealous relationship we establish with our collection of pots.

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Rappi announces its biggest acquisition

The Colombian Rappi announced this Monday (10) that it agreed to acquire the Brazilian startup Box Delivery, which operates in the “wholesale” sector of food and product deliveries in the country.

• The transaction did not have values ​​disclosed and still depends on the approval of Cade (Administrative Council for Economic Defense).

• It was the biggest purchase in Rappi’s history.

Who is who

A Box Delivery was founded in 2016, in Santos (SP), and specializes in the “last mile” delivery model (last step before the product arrives at the customer’s home).

• Among its customers are McDonald’s, Ultrafarma, Burger King, Zé Delivery, among other companies. Aliansce Sonae is one of its investors, and now becomes Rappi’s partner with the acquisition.

Rappi it is present in around 140 cities in the country and treats Brazil as its main market. The Colombian company is iFood’s main rival in the food delivery sector in large Brazilian cities.

• She was considered one of the winners of the agreement between iFood and Cade that prohibited exclusive contracts with brands that have 30 or more establishments.

• Rappi said that the agreement had no influence on the purchase of Box Delivery.

• For the Colombian, the business can also help in the growth of the company’s retail segment, which promises deliveries in up to 15 minutes.

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Daniel’s three chatbots

After having developed his first chatbot when he was 9 years old, Brazilian Daniel de Freitas, 33, left Google in 2021 to found Character.AI.

The AI ​​(artificial intelligence) startup was valued at $1 billion last month in a US$ 150 million (about R$ 760 million) investment led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the heavyweights in the startup investment market.

The history of the Brazilian

• Graduated in computer engineering at USP (University of São Paulo), he was still a software engineer at Microsoft before joining Google in 2016.

• At Alphabet’s company, he was responsible for creating Lamda. The acronym in English, which means language model for dialog applications, would become the basis of Bard, a chatbot that Google launched to rival ChatGPT.

• He and American Noam Shazeer, an engineer who had been with the company since 2000, repeatedly tried to convince big tech executives to release the chatbot to the public, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

• Resigned to the executives’ denials, who turned down the project for not meeting Google’s security standards, according to the American newspaper, Daniel and Noam left the company in 2021 to create Character.AI.

How Character.AI works

• On the startup platform that went live six months ago, the user can chat with about 2.7 million of characters, including famous people –living or not– and anonymous.

• There are profiles of personalities from all over the world, including Brazilian ones, such as Machado de Assis, Anitta and Neymar, and politicians, such as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro (PL).

• The vast majority of profiles are created by the users themselves. What the startup does is supply the platform with large amounts of dialogue and web pages, including news and articles about public figures.

• Robots don’t just gossip. They can be used to help compose emails, summarize books, and write programming code.

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Work in the office; get fired at home

The first wave of layoffs at technology companies after the pandemic hiring boom brought something new: remote layoffs.

• This was the case with Google, which in January fired thousands of employees via email.

• At Meta, employees learned of plans for a year of big cuts in a 2,000-word memo from CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Companies from other sectors also adopted this method. Last week, McDonald’s asked corporate employees, who usually work in the office at least three days a week, to do their homework.

• The plan was to lay off hundreds of employees, according to the DealBook website.

If, on the one hand, the remote dismissal notice may sound like something insensitive, the decision to call people who don’t go there much to the office just to dismiss them is not the best of both worlds, said workers and specialists interviewed by the New York Times.