A couple of stories that caught our attention this week and illustrate the opportunities for regional growth along the new Silk Road:
Emaar is the heavyweight property developer who has provided us with much of Dubai’s landscape, including the emblematic Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest tower. Emaar’s results which were out yesterday, it reported a loss just over $325 million. While it is popular to trash talk Dubai’s real estate market these days, we find it rather interesting that the loss is mainly due to their exposure to US real Estate as it writes off the entire book value of position in JL Homes for a loss of approx $463 million. Excluding this write off, profit stood at $93 million. These revenues not only come from Emaar’s UAE assets but to a degree they were derived from projects in Turkey and Pakistan! This bit of detail is often overlooked as the company is in the spotlight with regards to an upcoming merger with other local government backed property developers, but the strategy of operating in territories that have nearly 230 million inhabitants seems to make lots of sense going forward
Maroc Telecom also announced its H1 results which showed an increase in consolidated results: revenues up by 2%to $1.8 billion net income up by 2.6% to $575 million. But most importantly in our opinion, Maroc Telecom has been able to grow its customer base by 5.3% to almost 20 million users with impressive growth seen in its African subsidiaries (Mauritania +30%, Gabon +26% and Burkina Faso +74%). The company expects to continue to able to grow revenus by 2% and operating margins at 45%. Maroc Telecom is another clear example of the regional opportunities for growth in our territory of focus…
Kind regards
Baldwin
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