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 Chrystia Freeland:

The revolutionary significance of job growth

It was striking to hear how encouraged both Klaus Kleinfeld and Dominic Barton sounded when Chrystia asked them about the effects of the recent turmoil in the Middle East on the business environment there. Barton believed the regime changes in Tunisia and Egypt were "the dawn of a new good thing that's occurring" and noted that it is likely that new capital will come into these countries as a new leadership emerges. Kleinfeld, whose company is in the process of building the world's largest integrated aluminum system in Saudi Arabia, said that Alcoa is still very comfortable in the region and that the only surprises with their Saudi partners have been positive surprises. For Kleinfeld, the most assured way to bring about stability in a region plagued by unrest is to have businesses come in and create jobs:

If there's one thing that the Middle East needs particularly for the young -- as well as well-educated people -- it's jobs. And it does it in a region which typically has not had much of an economic growth around Ras Azzour. So that's all very, very good. And not just for us as a company but also for the region. And it's gonna have a stabilizing as well as a kind of uplifting, positive element

Like Saudi Arabia, China has a large population that accepts a level of repression so long as the leadership can deliver economic growth. Barton, a China expert who headed McKinsey's Asia operations before ascending to the consultancy's top spot, said that he did not think that dissent in China would spillover and create a Middle-East-style uprising because the Chinese Communist Party has been able to stay on top of job growth. He had an interesting anecdote about McKinsey's study on the effectiveness of China's stimulus plan that illustrated the leadership's obsession with maintaining growth:

During the financial crisis, there was a stimulation program that was being put in place. And we'd been asked, almost ordered to do work to figure out what sort of discount should you put on TVs in tier three cities? It was a very focused question. And the reason was they were trying to create consumer demand in a very sophisticated manner. Do you sort of drop the price by 25 percent or do you have people buy it and they get a 25 percent rebate from the mayor? That was literally the thing.

And as we were talking about this I was amazed at how sort of precise it was. I said, you know, we gotta make sure that the impact is there and how we do -- sort of doing the McKinsey thing, we wanna make sure this happens. And this guy said to me, "I think we have a different definition of impact than you." And I said, "What's that?" And he says, "If this doesn't work, we're gonna have probably 12 million people that won't have jobs. And you should know that all of the revolutions in our 5,000 year history have occurred in the countryside."

And so there is a revolution -- it -- so he was just trying to explain to me we understand how important this is, you idiot, basically.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair.

from MediaFile:

GlobalMedia-China’s shouts of “You suck!” music to executives’ ears

Big splashy action movies from the U.S. usually play well abroad. It should come then as no surprise that World Wrestling Entertainment, known for hulky dudes and toned ladies who act out soap opera scenarios both in and out of the ring,  manages to find fans well beyond these borders.

So, naturally, international expansion is something on the mind of Donna Goldsmith, the chief operating officer of WWE, who ticked off countries including Russia, India and Brazil where it’s seeking to introduce characters like Sheamus, Triple H and John Cena.

As a way to illustrate the global appeal of wrestling, Goldsmith relayed how talent is perceived in China, a country where WWE is available in 90 million households.

The worst thing that could happen in wrestling-vile, according to Goldsmith during Reuters Global Media Summit, is stone cold silence. Thus she knew things were going well for WWE when wrestlers showed up in Shanghai and the audience yelled “You suck!”

“It was great!” Goldsmith said. “They knew the bad guys from the good guys.”

Talent is what the WWE is all about, according to Goldsmith, who also worked for the National Basketball Association.

"Our talent is so wonderful and so articulate, to bring them to a Wal-Mart managers meeting is something we do often. They understand the business side of things, which is so different to any NBA player, I wouldn't bring the twelfth guy on the bench with me to Wal-Mart because I wouldn't know what would come out of that."

Barbie does Beijing: The adventures of a Malibu girl in China

Modern day national influence, some smart people like to argue, spreads through the “soft power” of brand appeal and attraction rather than the “hard power” of coercion. In China, one avatar of U.S.  soft power tends to be trim and busty, and come with blue eyes and a long mane of blonde hair. Her name is Barbie, she is made of plastic, she was born in Malibu and Chinese girls want to be like her.

Barbie comes in all sorts of versions, according to the man who introduces her to her foreign friends, Mattel’s international president, Bryan Stockton. Still, in China, the No. 1-selling Barbie doll is the sunny surfer girl who cruised across the Pacific from southern California to bring millions of young Chinese girls a new vision of the world, not to mention themselves.

“The challenge (in China) is to have toys become a part of the culture,” Stockton said at the Reuters Consumer and Retail Summit on Monday. “We’re trying to get our toys to be a part of a child’s development. … In Chinese culture it’s very important to help girls think they can aspire to be something. … Barbie is a western icon and she’s an American icon, and Barbie is from Malibu, California.”

“Now,” Stockton said, “Barbie is a part of Chinese educational culture and Chinese pop culture.”

It’s important to remember, however, that it’s not about seeing yourself in Barbie’s physical manifestation here on earth. As Stockton said:

“In reality, Barbie is a toy. Barbie is for aspiration. … Barbie doesn’t represent anything concrete. Barbie is a plastic doll, so what we try to concentrate on is all the things Barbie provides for girls… She’s a great thing for girls. She’s done a lot of wonderful things for girls, and so we’re going to continue to emphasize the positive.”

Wish they all could be California girls? Wish no longer.

Recession’s perfect storm speeds up change in ad industry

Why is it that the United States’ advertising as a proportion of marketing services is at its lowest point since 1977, maybe even lower than since the Second World War?

You may have guessed it it’s the recession.

But it will get better, Martin Sorrell, CEO of advertising giant WPP, said.

“The recession is less worse,” Sorrell said, repeating a favourite phrase of late, and while it’s the biggest recession since 1929 it is also “a perfect storm” that has brought forward change. 

“The recession has accelerated structural changes that were already happening,” Sorrell said at the Reuters Global Media Summit.

Will advertising ever go back to where it was? Yes, if you are looking at new media advertising on Kindles and mobile.

Will the United States rebound? Western Europe? Yes, to both.

Peugeot is far too small in China

There is only one market really booming in the world and that is China, pity Peugeot only has a very small market share there.

Nicolas Wertans, deputy managing director of the Peugeot brand at Europe’s second-biggest carmaker PSA Peugeot Citroen, recently went to Beijing.

“It is the only market that is still booming, at more than 70 percent month-on-month,” he told the Reuters Automotive Summit. “In fact, China came to the rescue of the automotive world,” he said as all carmakers are boosting their sales in that market which is set to become the biggest in the world.

But Peugeot is rather small in China, with a market share of just 1.2/1.3 percent.

PSA in total has a share of 3.5 percent and chief executive Philippe Varin has said this needs to rise to at least 10 percent. To get there, Peugeot is working on a new model, especially designed for the Chinese market.

It will be a sedan, Wertans said, but he declined to give more details.

U.S. Commerce Secretary doesn’t like ring of Shanghai Silicon Valley

U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke says one thing he doesn’t want to see is a Shanghai Silicon Valley develop from China’s investment in clean energy.

He warned that if the United States doesn’t move forward on clean energy, it risks falling behind China where the government is spending almost $100 billion a year to support renewable energy and clean energy efficiency.

And China is not doing it just to address climate change issues, but because it sees an economic opportunity. “They’re really focusing investing in the clean energy field to serve the needs of the world,” Locke said at the Reuters Washington Summit.

“And so that’s why it’s very important that we pass clean energy legislation because there’s so many investors, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists who are sitting on the sidelines waiting for that certainty,” he said. “They just want to know what the rules of the game are, what the tax incentives are, what the tax rules and regulations are before they commit.”

The longer the U.S. government takes to pass comprehensive energy legislation, “the farther ahead the Chinese will be and we certainly do not want 10 years from now Shanghai and other parts of China to be the Silicon Valley of the clean energy field,” Locke said.

He agreed with President Barack Obama’s equation. “The president has said that the country that leads in the clean energy sector will lead the world economy, I believe that’s true,” Locke said.

For more news from the Reuters Washington Summit, click here.

60-hour work weeks, all in the name of climate change

Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can’t say members of the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism’s executive board aren’t clocking in the hours.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.

Projects are submitted to the CDM for registration and a staff of over 100 examine and scrutinize each one to ensure environmental integrity.

The whole scheme is supervised by a 20-member executive board, chaired by Lex de Jonge of the Netherlands’ environment ministry.

“The members are all employed by governments and assigned to the board. They don’t get a salary from the UN but they receive a daily subsistence allowance to pay for meals, hotel and travel costs,” de Jonge said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

“As chair of the board, I spend 75% of my time on CDM issues and 25% on domestic issues relating to my actual job,” he added.

The CDM’s executive board holds some 7 to 8 week-long meetings a year, up from 5 meetings in 2005, the year international emissions trading really began to take shape.

The visible hand

Beijing’s affordable housing projects — which account for 10 percent of the government’s huge $585 billion stimulus package, a key to propping up the crucial property market — is making fans of low income wage earners, but has some developers seething.

Some developers see the government’s role in the market as interference in market forces that are distorting prices.

“This market is monopolised, there is no fair competition,” Feng Lun, the chairman of Beijing Vantone Real Estate Co, told the Reuters China Investment Summit.

“The government is increasingly controlling property prices,” said Feng. “Whatever price they want that’s where the price is.”

The government’s affordable housing is pulling prices down around the country, according to Feng.

The government’s motives are rooted in simple math.

Investment in residential housing made up about 10 percent of gross domestic product before the property boom turned to bust in 2008, roughly the same as the country’s huge export sector.

A “cash cow”

By Don Durfee

Safe havens have been few and far between during the global economic crisis, but one has been fairly reliable: infrastructure. So it’s not surprising that many companies are betting on the biggest infrastructure opportunity of them all, China’s $585 billion spending package.

One of those is NWS Holdings, a subsidiary of Hong Kong’s New World Development. Speaking at the Reuters China Investment Summit, executive director Tsang Yam Pui spoke glowingly about the company’s investment in a project to develop 18 rail container terminals around the country.

Rail looks like a promising area. China’s crumbling rail network is due for an upgrade and only 3 percent of domestic cargo is shipped in containers, compared with 20-30 percent in developed markets. Beijing will pour 700 billion yuan into the sector over the next three years and everyone from those laying the tracks to those making the train’s braking systems are hoping to cash in.

The company certainly needs a boost. Many of its other businesses, which range from stock broking to running Hong Kong’s convention centre, have suffered during the economic slowdown. It posted a 64 percent drop in six-month profit.

NWS also sees itself gaining from the country’s push to develop water projects — both treatment and supply — and expressways. In addition to its rail projects, to which its committing $1.76 billion, the company plans to commit another $146 million annually to these areas, Tsang said.

With any luck, China’s stimulus will perk up NWS’s own profit. Or, as Tsang described China’s rail investments: “For the MOR (Ministry of Railway), this project is a national mission and for us it is a future cash cow.”