Summit Notebook

from Global Investing:

BRIC: Brilliant/Ridiculous Investment Concept

BRIC is Brazil, Russia, India, China -- the acronym coined by Goldman Sachs banker Jim O'Neill 10 years back to describe the world's biggest, fastest-growing and most important emerging markets.  But according to Albert Edwards, Societe Generale's uber-bearish strategist, it also stands for Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept. Some investors, licking their wounds due to BRIC markets' underperformance in 2011 and 2010, might be inclined to agree -- stocks in all four countries have performed worse this year than the broader emerging markets equity index, to say nothing of developed world equities.

For years, money has chased BRIC investments, tempted by the countries' fast growth, huge populations and explosive consumer hunger for goods and services. But Edwards cites research showing little correlation between growth and investment returns. He points out that Chinese nominal GDP growth may have averaged 15.6 percent  since 1993 but the compounded  return on equity investments was minus 3.3 percent.

But economic growth -- the BRIC holy grail -- is also now slowing. Data showed this week that Brazil posted zero growth in the third quarter of 2011 compared to last year's 7.5 percent. Indian growth is  at the weakest in over two years. In Russia, rising discontent with the Kremlin -- reflected in post-election protests -- carries the risk of hitting the broader economy. And China, facing falling exports to a moribund Western world,  is also bound to slow. Edwards goes a step further and flags a hard landing in China as the biggest potential investment shock of 2012.  "Yet investors persist in the BRIC superior growth fantasy...If growth does matter to investors, they should be worried that things seem to be slowing sharply in the BRIC universe," he writes.

Thomson Reuters data earlier this year appeared to show some disenchantment with the BRIC concept. After rising 1600-fold between 2003 and 2007, assets in BRIC funds had shrunk to $28 billion by August 2011, almost a quarter below 2007 peaks, a bigger fall in percentage terms than most other fund categories.

What of O'Neill, the man behind the moniker? He talks increasingly of Growth Markets, a broader grouping that also includes other promising emerging countries such as Turkey and Mexico. But at a Reuters investment summit this week O'Neill noted that the main reason for BRIC stocks' underperformance has been a massive monetary policy tightening exercise in all four countries, prompted by rising inflation.  With that at an end and valuations cheaper than they have been for a long time, he expects the BRIC markets, especiallly China, to do better next year despite slower growth. Time will tell.

from Abhiram Nandakumar:

Stories of intuition and hope

Infosys’ head honcho S.D. Shibulal revealed he is an INTJ type.  It is hardly surprising then that Shibu, as he likes to be called, was one of the pioneers of the Global Delivery Model – corporate speak for outsourced IT services.

INTJ (short for Introvert, Intuition, Thinking and Judgment) is a rare personality type based on psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s works. INTJ personalities are self-starters, preferring to work alone without an authority looking over their shoulders and meticulously plan their activities to achieve success.

Shibulal’s thoughts on M&A and his company’s margins reflect his INTJ traits.

“M&A is like falling in love. There is no plan like falling in love!” he said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

Considering it has only made three acquisitions over the last five years, Infosys clearly doesn't fall in love easily.

Still, Shibu said the Indian software services behemoth “is comfortable spending 10 percent of its revenue on acquisitions.”

from Abhiram Nandakumar:

A garage, a beaker and a Bunsen burner

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, one of India’s most influential businesswomen and among the world’s most powerful women, says she’s an accidental entrepreneur.

Mazumdar-Shaw has shown that modest garage start-ups can extend beyond software and hardware companies. She set up what is now India's largest listed biotechnology company in 1978 and she encourages others to follow suit.

“Today a lot of early stage research work can be done in a garage,” she said at the Reuters India Investment Summit.

Mazumdar-Shaw reckons opportunities for bio-tech startups are huge, considering the demand for sophisticated technology like genomic based systems, diagnostics for cancer stem cells, and high-end synthetic biology. All these are usually developed in small labs across the country.

“What I find today is that there are a large number of very innovative young biotech entrepreneurs who are doing things in a very small way. CellWorks is doing very interesting work on drug design.”

Her advice to budding entrepreneurs – If you have a novel idea and are looking to set up a business, don’t think twice, just go for it.

from Global News Journal:

Waiting for Europe’s “appropriate response”

Will the euro zone finally act decisively?

Investors are hoping for something big from European leaders at the EU summit on Oct. 23 and of the Group of 20 on Nov. 3. But they also know the 17 nations of the euro have a habit of offering delayed, half-hearted rescues that have cost them credibility.

So there's been a lot of "urging" and "warning" in Brussels lately -- politicians and central bankers have all been demanding Europe act as international alarm grows that its sovereign debt problems may drag the world into recession. "Further delays are only aggravating the situation," said European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet on Tuesday in his last appearance at the European Parliament, before he hands over the post to Mario Draghi on Nov. 1.

A day earlier, Germany's Deputy Finance Minister, Joerg Asmussen, at the parliament to promote his candidacy to join the ECB's board, made his call, saying "cooperation has to be increased," across the euro members, divided as to who should pay to rescue the heavily indebted nations of southern Europe. "I want to see a solution for debt sustainability for Greece," Asmussen said. So do so many others, especially Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who in Brussels on Thursday said it was a "crucial element to make the necessary decisions concerning Greece."

The European Roundtable of Industrialists, a business lobby of multinationals ranging from French car maker Renault to Spain's Telefonica, has also come through Brussels to make its point. The group's head, Leif Johansson, who is also chairman of Swedish phone maker Ericsson, warned that if European leaders fail to act, businesses could see a repeat of the liquidity freeze that followed the collapse of U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers.

"The worst element of the 2008/2009 crisis was when liquidity froze," he said. "The worst scenario we have right now is that that could happen again ... and there is a real downside risk." 

The Oct. 23 summit is being billed as a make-or-break event where Germany and France, the main powers in the euro zone, must come up with the solutions investors want. A meeting last Sunday between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, and their promise of a comprehensive strategy, suggests there will be a serious attempt to put forward a framework to try to resolve the crisis.

Short-term hopes, long-term gloom

By Tomasz Janowski

Optimism that Japan’s economy will bounce back from a post-quake slump and pessimism about its long-term prospects is the prevailing message of economists addressing the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit.

The reasons for the near-term optimism are well known: strides made by Japanese manufacturers in restoring production and supply networks ripped apart by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami and expectations that sooner or later hundreds of billions of dollars spent on rebuilding the ravaged northeast coast will grease the wheels of the stuttering economy.

There is also little doubt about what has been holding back Japan, which has been in and out of deflation and recessions over the past decade.

Its society is aging faster than any other nation, the productive (and consuming) population is shrinking, its manufacturers keep shifting operations abroad where wages are lower and markets grow and its debt burden makes it impossible for Tokyo to engage in any grand-scale pump-priming.

Now, one can also add concerns that a shift away from nuclear power will bring higher costs and doubts about reliability of electricity supply and possibly accelerate the hollowing out of the manufacturing sector.

Looking forward to inflation

By Tim Kelly

Yoshiharu Hoshino, the president of Hoshino Resort, one of Japan’s leading resort operators, is looking forward to a dose of inflation after years of sliding prices.

By engineering a rise in rates by printing money, he reckons Japan can make a big chunk of its burgeoning national debt disappear, which along with tax hikes is, he predicts, likely the way Japan is going to exit a potential crisis as debt soars to more than twice its gross domestic product.

While having the nasty side affect of making assets worth less tomorrow than today, if, like Hoshino, you borrow money to buy the bricks and mortar of hotels, the plus side is your debt, relative to your cash flow will also get smaller as long as you have low rates locked in.

“It would be a very big plus,” said Hoshino told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit in Tokyo.  Japan defaulting on its debt is unlikely, he said.

Resort owners who agree with Hoshino, who already own 27 facilities in Japan, may therefore be tempted to borrow more to buy more and wait for robust inflation to pay the loans back.

Suntech eyes Japan growth

By Leonora Walet

Suntech Power may be the world’s biggest solar panel maker but it trails Sharp, Kyocera, Panasonic and Mitsubishi Electric in the fast-growing Japanese solar market.

Now, the company is set to take on these Japanese rivals on their home turf and aims to double its market share in the country to 10 percent next year.

The catalyst? The expected adoption of a special tariff, now being discussed by lawmakers, on power from solar panels to lure investors to bigger projects.

Japan’s ambitious plan, if implemented, to get solar panels on the roofs of every new building would of course also give the market a hefty boost.

“We need to take market share from the top four. Our immediate goal is to pass Mitsubishi,” Yutaka Yamamoto, Suntech Power Japan president, told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit in Tokyo.

When debt monetisation makes sense

If push comes to shove and Japan runs into difficulties finding buyers for its low-yielding government bonds, a little debt monetisation — a dirty word for central banks — would not be a bad thing.

Tomoya Masanao, managing director and head of Japan portfolio management at PIMCO, told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit that if private investors are not willing to buy JGBs, then the central bank should fill the breach.

“If the Japanese private sector does not have enough ability to fund the government, it’s natural that the central bank should step in,” Masanao said.

Such a move would weaken the currency, and that would be a positive for an economy that is now grappling with a strong yen on top of the many other economic challenges it is facing.

For now, Japan faces no such threat of private investors being unable to lend the government a hand. As Masanao noted, Japanese corporations and households tend to save even more money when the fiscal deficit rises — as is almost certain as government reconstruction spending kicks in after the massive March 11 earthquake, tsnuami and nuclear scare. Indeed, a chart below shows the remarkably strong relationship between government borrowing and household savings over the years.

Benchmark Japanese government bond yields are hovering near 1 percent and have only breached the 2 percent threshold twice since falling below that level in 1997. As the population ages, household savings rates have fallen. But with household financial assets at $18.5 trillion — and a little more than half of that kept in cash and low-yielding bank deposits — the supply of funds heading into JGBs remains ample, even with debt set to surpass 200 percent of Japan’s $6 trillion GDP this year.

With the euro zone debt crisis raging more than a year later, the question of whether Japan faces its own debt crisis has been hotly debated. Still, the trigger for any Japan debt crisis remains far off and will be of a much different nature than Europe’s troubles. Beyond its savings, Japan enjoys steady trade surpluses (despite the record deficit coming out of the disaster), and for that reason does not rely on foreign investors . Of course, the Bank of Japan already buys a hefty chunk of government bonds, even while arguing this does not equate to monetisation and fighting against any pressure to monetise.

Perils of disaster fixation

By Tim Kelly

Fixated on reviving the shattered northeastern seaboard, Japan risks neglecting growth in the rest of the economy, warns Takeshi Niinami, CEO of Lawson, Japan’s second-biggest convenience store operator.

“The question is what do you do about the other 95 percent of the economy,” Niinami told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit in Tokyo.

His remedy: throw Japan open to the rest of the world and deregulate, policies more in vogue before Japan’s March 11 earthquake than since.

Niinami wants Japan’s politicians to rediscover their pre-quake appetite to thrust Japan into trade pacts either with Southeast Asian economies or the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a policy that Prime Minister Naoto Kan enthused about at the start of the year but since March 11 has dropped.

Opening up Japan is not just about letting foreign people, ideas and capital in, he says, but also about companies moving out.

Hard road on Japan’s nuclear policy

By Kevin Krolicki

Suddenly Taro Kono doesn’t look like quite the lonely maverick in Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party.

Kono, a member of the lower house of parliament, has been an unrelenting critic of Japan’s pursuit of nuclear power since he was first elected in 1996. That made him an odd fit with the LDP, which ruled Japan almost continuously from the mid-1950s to 2009 and put nuclear power at the center of Japan’s energy policy.

“For the past 15 years, it has felt like Taro Kono against the LDP,” he told the Reuters Rebuilding Japan Summit.

But since the Fukushima Daiichi accident triggered by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, Kono’s call to scrap nuclear in favour of renewable energy and conservation has moved from the fringe to something closer to the mainstream of political opinion.

About 50 lawmakers attended a recent study group he sponsored on energy policy, out of 722, and Kono sees a prospect for a kind of “green alliance” between sympathetic LDP lawmakers and some in the Democratic Party of Japan.