This Investor Seeks To Buy A Dollar For Fifty Cents

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Larry Macdonald

Brian Langis, 29

Occupation

Investment manager and consultant

The portfolio

Positions in American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. and other companies.

The investor

Brian Langis manages a private investment company and serves as a consultant for a frontier (or “pre-emerging”) market fund. He is a candidate for the Chartered Business Valuators membership exam in 2014.

How he invests

Mr. Langis uses his business valuation skills to estimate how much a company is worth. If the amount is greater than the company’s stock-market capitalization, Mr. Langis may be interested in buying its shares (after factoring in a margin of safety).

“The one particular metric I really put emphasis on is free cash-flow generation,” he adds. “With excess cash, they can pay me a dividend, reinvest in the company, pay some debt, or acquire a company. In general, if a company can increase their excess cash capabilities, that can translate into higher stock prices.”

At the moment, his portfolio is mostly concentrated in U.S. financial stocks – one of the “few sectors that remains undervalued.” As for SNC-Lavalin, the “ethics scandal is keeping the company down, but underneath there’s a going-concern company with great assets.”

“As you can see, I have a penchant for companies that make it on the most-hated list,” sums up Mr. Langis. “To find value, you sometimes have to look where others are not, and usually you end up in undesired places.”

Best move

Mr. Langis recently “hit a home-run” with World Wrestling Entertainment Inc., registering a 100-per-cent return over a seven-month holding period. He had read the company’s filings and “knew that if somebody wanted to buy the company” they would have to pay a lot more than the market capitalization. Also, there was no debt, and a stable 5-per-cent dividend yield.

Worst move

“With the bull market over the last couple years… [it was] not pulling the trigger at certain opportunities that I found undervalued.”

Advice

“Focus on the value of a company and its relation to share price.”

Africa’s investment boom offers valuable lessons (PART XI)

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Geoffrey York

Here is the finale of the Africa Next series by Geoffrey York. Here how Geoffrey got the idea for this series:
From a recent chat.

It came from seeing all the hype by investment banks and business executives about “Africa Rising” and the “Africa boom.” We know that the official growth numbers are impressive — 7 of the 10 fastest-growing countries in the world are African — but I wanted to know what it really means for ordinary Africans. Are they benefiting from the boom? Are they getting jobs from the foreign investment in mining and oil? Or is it primarily for the benefit of foreign owners?

PART 1: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
PART 2: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
PART 3: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
PART 4: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
PART 5: The impact of the new land grab
NOW: How the boom can transform Africa

Within sight of the biggest gold mine in Burkina Faso, hundreds of children are slipping silently into starvation.

They live in flimsy wattle or mud huts in a scrub wasteland. They help their parents scrounge for flecks of gold in the sand. And every month, hundreds are so malnourished that they need emergency food at the village clinic – just a short walk from the perimeter of the massive high-tech gold mine, owned by a Canadian company.

I’ve seen the same contrasts and inequities across Africa: poverty and hunger in the shadow of gleaming new mines and plantations; luxury hotel towers rising near crowded slums; villagers gaining jobs from multinational projects while others lose their land; local entrepreneurs capitalizing on the economic growth even as most of the profits go to foreign shareholders.

Land rush leaves Liberia’s farmers in the dust (Part X)

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Geoffrey York

PART 1: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
PART 2: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
PART 3: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
PART 4: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
NOW: The impact of the new land grab
PART 6: How the boom can transform Africa

As he walks through the denuded remains of his farm, Kandakai Blasuah points to the marshland where he used to fish. It’s now dry, filled with sand.

The bush where he gathered medicinal herbs is also gone. His farm, too, has vanished. All that’s left are a few rows of corn, and a new road to serve the vast palm plantation that has enveloped his village for the past two years.

“When I was born and opened my eyes, I saw this land,” he says. “I used to have a good life. We had cassava, bananas, plantain, peppers, aloe – but they took it all away.”

From a nearby hilltop, Mr. Blasuah gazes out at the plantation. In every direction, the fields have been stripped of trees and crops. Some are already filled with palm seedlings, planted by Sime Darby, the Malaysian company that took a 63-year lease on the land in 2009.

Africa next: An enterprising hand up, not a handout (Part IV)

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Geoffrey York

PART 1: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
PART 2: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
PART 3: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
NOW: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
PART 5: The impact of the new land grab
PART 6: How the boom can transform Africa

In this fourth of a six-part series, Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Geoffrey York investigates how Africa’s growth is changing its future.

Claudio Scotto paces the factory floor and throws his hands to the sky. His machinery is idle, the diesel generator has broken down – and now the repairmen are insisting on cash before they stir themselves.

“I had a moment of hope, but it disappeared very quickly,” he mutters. And then he rushes off to negotiate with the truckers who transport the raw material to his factory. They, too, want a raise.

It’s just another stressful day at Africa Felix Juice, a pioneering enterprise on the outskirts of Sierra Leone’s capital. Its product may seem mundane – barrels of mango and pineapple juice concentrate – but it represents a crucial breakthrough: The company is the first manufacturer to export from Sierra Leone since the end of its long civil war in 2002.

Africa Felix Juice also reveals a new strategy for aid in Africa. Instead of just digging wells or providing medicine, foreign donors are increasingly trying to encourage African business and markets.

“We’re all now doing some soul-searching on what it means to serve the poor,” said Canadian aid worker Richard Schroeder. After 17 years toiling for aid agencies in Asia and elsewhere, Mr. Schroeder is trying a new approach.

He became the president of First Step, a donor-supported profit-making company that created the special industrial zone where the juice factory was born.

The backbone of Africa: Entrepreneurs who refuse to quit (PART III)

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Geoffrey York

PART 1: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
PART 2: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
NOW: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
PART 4: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
PART 5: The impact of the new land grab
PART 6: How the boom can transform Africa

In this third of a six-part series, Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Geoffrey York investigates how Africa’s growth is changing its future.

By the age of 33, Wilfred Sam-King had earned and lost a fortune three times over. Each time he built a business from nothing, he saw it looted or torched in a coup or a rebel invasion.

When rebels laid siege to Freetown in 1999, they searched everywhere for Sierra Leone’s famed businessman, aiming to take his money. One day they captured him – but he had disguised himself in shabby clothes, pretending to be his own cook. He made soup for the rebels for three days before escaping.

Refusing to leave his homeland – even after his wife and children found shelter in Canada during the civil war – he patiently rebuilt his fortune again, and today has created a small empire of hotels, retail shops and other businesses worth $20-million.

His determination has made Mr. Sam-King one of Sierra Leone’s most successful entrepreneurs – and living proof of the persistence and imagination that is transforming Africa’s economy.

Africa next: The quest for Africa’s riches (PART II)

Reposted from The Globe and Mail
By Geoffrey York

AFRICA NEXT: A SIX-PART SERIES

PART 1: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
NOW: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
PART 3: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
PART 4: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
PART 5: The impact of the new land grab
PART 6: How the boom can transform Africa

In this second of a six-part series, Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Geoffrey York investigates how Africa’s growth is changing its future.

Driving north in Africa’s copper belt, Mark Crandon marvels at the new factories and offices along the highway. “It’s crazy,” he says. “None of this was here three weeks ago.”

It’s an unlikely place for a foreign investor to be raving about. The Democratic Republic of the Congo is one of the world’s most corrupt, impoverished and war-torn countries. Millions have died in the military and political chaos of recent years. Yet even here, the lure of the Africa boom is proving irresistible.

Africa next: With investment outpacing aid, is this a new golden age for the poorest continent? (PART I)

Here is a six-part series straight from the Globe and Mail. Good research and piece by Geoffrey York.

From The Globe and Mail:
AFRICA NEXT: A SIX-PART SERIES

NOW: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
PART 2: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
PART 3: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels
PART 4: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
PART 5: The impact of the new land grab
PART 6: How the boom can transform Africa

In this first of a six-part series, Globe and Mail Africa correspondent Geoffrey York investigates how Africa’s growth is changing its future.

In the dusty streets of the tiny village of Romaro, a building boom is under way. Crumbling mud shacks are being replaced by new tin-roofed houses. Almost overnight, the village’s ancient way of life has vanished. Most of its farmland has been swallowed up by a Swiss multinational, Addax Bioenergy, which has leased more than 14,000 hectares of Sierra Leone for a $330-million sugar-cane plantation to produce ethanol for the European market.