Global Trading | May 15, 2013
Leopard
Capital Fund Manager, Thomas Hugger of Leopard Asia Frontier Fund and Managing
Partner of Leopard Capital LP, goes through some of the major difficulties
faced in various frontier markets in Asia.
In
the frontier markets, even though you have electronic data services such as the
internet, social media, and Bloomberg, it is very difficult to get financial
papers or balance sheet papers, and other fundamental papers for some of the
companies in these locations. Even if you go to Bloomberg and search on Bangladesh,
you don’t have the balance sheet there. If you go into Bloomberg and look at
Mongolian stocks, you will often find the price, but the description says, “The
company currently has no available information on their current line of
business as of 08/2008”. These are often blue-chip companies, and sometimes we
have visited them or we have networks there, but there is limited information
available.
But this is frequently because business is based
on a more personal note, and I would say physical representation gives a big
advantage. Our strategy on the private equity side complements this, so
everywhere we have firms, we have offices. So we have an office in Cambodia, we
have an office in Laos, we have an office in Haiti. When we are successful in
fundraising for Myanmar and Bangladesh, we will have offices there too.
For private individuals it is still very
difficult to invest in these markets. Go to a private bank in Hong Kong or
Singapore, tell them you want to buy stock in Laos or even Vietnam and they
will often tell you “Oh we are sorry, we cannot execute”.
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