Trending
- Agribusiness could drive Africa’s economic prosperity
- Dawood Al Shezawi: Why AIM Congress 2024 is the epicenter of global economic and cultural dialogues
- d.light’s 600,000 cookstoves project verified as top source of quality carbon credits
- Artificial intelligence (AI) could create a turning point for financial inclusion in Africa
- AIM Congress 2024: Catalysing global investments with awards
- Kenya’s economic resurgence in 2024
- The most stressful cities to live in 2024 exposed
- Tech ventures can now apply for the Africa Tech Summit London Investment Showcase
Search Results: tim staermose (4)
Earlier this week, several people forwarded me a link to a recent article published by The Economist, which makes the bold claim that Tanzania’s official economic statistics are bogus.
Among other things, the nameless author (a feature of The Economist is that it has no by-lines) claims that cement sales by the top two firms are “flat,” and bank lending to companies slumped. To quote the article directly:“If Tanzania’s economy grew by almost 7% in the fiscal year to the end of June 2019, why did tax revenue fall by 1%? And why has bank lending to companies slumped? Private data are bad, too. In 2019 sales at the biggest brewer fell by 5%. Sales of cement by the two biggest producers were almost flat. None of these things is likely if growth is storming ahead. The discrepancies are so large that it is hard to avoid the
Rarely does any so-called “world leader” impress me. Some of them probably mean well in that superior, “I know better than you do what’s good for you” kind of way.
But in the big scheme of things, they are all elected for very short periods of time in office. Australian Prime Ministers get only three years at a time. US Presidents get four, maximum eight years.
In my view, that means they have little or no realistic chance to effect meaningful change for the good and leave their mark, unless they attempt something radical and reckless in the short term, pandering to certain interest groups.
Therein lies the problem. It takes much longer to effect meaningful change.
To cut to the chase, the list of world leaders, or former world leaders who served in my own adult life-time, whom I admire, is pretty short.
There are two:
- Nelson Mandela.
Recently I did an interview with the guys at the “State of the Markets” podcast. In it, I discuss many things, including a few specific investment ideas — stocks I have personally invested in, over the last 18 months, in Tanzania, which I plan to hold for many years.
If you haven’t listened to it yet, you may find it worthwhile. You can replay the entire conversation at the Global Value Hunter homepage.
One of the core attractions of investing in less developed markets around the world is that they still inhabit a normal universe where interest rates are positive, and it’s possible to earn excellent real rates of return on plain vanilla investments, such as government bonds and bank deposits.
In Tanzania, for example, one can currently attain as much as a 15.85% yield on 20-year government bonds. What’s more is that inflation in Tanzania is only 3.3%, …
Twiga Cement (TPCC on the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange) on Friday, May 22, 2020, released its Annual Report and audited accounts for the year ended 2019. Revenues grew 6% and net profits rose 5% in 2019 from the year earlier. Dividends were steady at TZS 290 per share for the third year running.
Twiga is the dominant cement company in Tanzania. It is the 19th-biggest company overall in East Africa by market value and the fifth-biggest in Tanzania, according to the latest African Business rankings.
The company is a subsidiary of German multinational Heidelberg Cement, which owns 69.3%. The other 30.7% trades on the DSE and is owned by thousands of small shareholders and investment funds.
Twiga has a huge competitive advantage over the other cement industry players in Tanzania, because its production facilities are on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam. Cement is heavy and expensive …