By Shunichi Ozasa and Keiko Ujikane
Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Sparx Group Co., Asia’s biggest hedge-fund company, will set up an investment partnership with Japan Wind Development Co. for a fund aimed at investing in Japanese environmental technology firms.
Sparx and Japan Wind, which sells windmill machinery and builds wind-power generating plants, will provide 500 million yen ($5.48 million) each for the investment partnership, Sparx’s Chief Executive Officer Shuhei Abe said in an interview in Tokyo today.
Abe said last month that Sparx plans to raise as much as 20 billion yen for a fund aimed at investing in Japanese environmental technology firms as mandates to cut carbon emissions spur demand.
The fund will invest in 10 to 20 companies with so-called smart grid technologies and aims to raise capital from global investors as early as January, Abe said today.
To contact the reporters on this
NEWS - Commodites, Agriculture, Green Investment - NEWS
1/04/2010
The case for traditional and alternative energy space integration
Written by Marks@Tiburon Monday, 04 January 2010 07:03
At the December Copenhagen conference on climate change rapidly approaching, all eyes will be on America and China, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas polluters, which combine to account for 40% of global carbon-dioxide emissions. Their commitment and leadership during the talks will be critical for laying the framework and principles for establishing a successor to Kyoto.
Whilst international agreements are undoubtedly important, the likelihood of targets being hit and the globe being saved will be just as dependent (if not more so) on the specific carbon reduction policies adopted by individual countries. With all nations embracing the adoption of renewable and alternative energy, but at different speeds, Tiburon Partners has recently launched a UCITs III compliant global long/short equity fund focused on alternative energy and natural resources to allow investors to benefit from these dynamic trends.
Tiburon Terra focusses its fundamental based investment process on identifying companies expected to benefit and/or suffer from environmental and climate change issues. Tiburon believes the long/short approach is best suited to take advantage of regional and sub-sector valuation discrepancies and will help protect investors capital during potential declines in what has been a highly volatile sector.
Rather than following the “green only” route the mandate of Tiburon Terra encompasses natural resources as well as renewable energy. We believe the two are inextricably linked - alternative energy is, afterall, only another way to produce electricity albeit in a cleaner fashion than that produced by coal or natural gas. Consequently Tiburon Terra will also take advantage of arbitrage opportunities that arise between renewables and companies in the natural resource sector. In addition, specific resources are fundamental to the development of renewable energy - rare earths or the technology metals are essential for the development of electric cars, smart grids, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, solar panels and environmental purification processes.
With China likely to contribute 63% of total global incremental emissions by 2020, its participation is a must to make a meaningful difference in emission levels even if the rest of the world cuts unilaterally. One of the key routes China will have to follow in reducing its carbon emissions is by reducing its coal consumption. This has clearly provided the impetus for China’s unprecedented thrust towards nuclear and renewable energy. Opportunities to exploit this are clear: we believe there is a good arbitrage between stocks like Yingli Green, a low cost PV solar module manufacturer, on the one hand and Shanghai Electric, a power generator heavily reliant on coal fired generation, on the other. Both stocks are trading at roughly the same projected P/E multiples in 2011. So too with nuclear: as an alternate form of energy that will provide an increasing share of incremental base-load generation in China, India and the rest of Asia, we believe stocks such as Dongfang, Cameco and Silex are all exciting prospects.
China is also central to rare earths or technology metals. Not only is it the dominant supplier of these rare but vital elements but it has proved to be acquisitive when new deposits have been identified outside its borders. Chinese entities have taken minority stakes in Australian mining groups Lynas Corp and Arafura Resources with predictable results for the stock prices.
We believe that electric vehicles will play a transformative role in transportation and may account for as many as 1 out of 10 new cars sold globally in 10 years. However, instead of investing in an over hyped and overvalued hybrid car battery maker like BYD, which trades at an eye watering 76x next years earnings, we have invested in Galaxy Resources which provides Lithium Carbonate, the mineral essential in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, for a more modest 12x earnings once mine production is stabilised.
Clearly the renewable concept has been around for some time but with targets set for 2020 it has in the past been consigned to the pending tray. Now however it is gathering momentum and is investible. Forget the idea that oil has to go back to USD150 before these new technologies and applications become viable: the major alternative energy technologies (wind and solar) have advanced meaningfully down their cost decline curves whereby they are either at (in the case of wind) or very near (in the case of solar) grid electricity rates. These technologies have already been embraced by major corporations and have moved mainstream and Tiburon Terra is well placed to capitalise.
At the December Copenhagen conference on climate change rapidly approaching, all eyes will be on America and China, the world’s two biggest greenhouse gas polluters, which combine to account for 40% of global carbon-dioxide emissions. Their commitment and leadership during the talks will be critical for laying the framework and principles for establishing a successor to Kyoto.
Whilst international agreements are undoubtedly important, the likelihood of targets being hit and the globe being saved will be just as dependent (if not more so) on the specific carbon reduction policies adopted by individual countries. With all nations embracing the adoption of renewable and alternative energy, but at different speeds, Tiburon Partners has recently launched a UCITs III compliant global long/short equity fund focused on alternative energy and natural resources to allow investors to benefit from these dynamic trends.
Tiburon Terra focusses its fundamental based investment process on identifying companies expected to benefit and/or suffer from environmental and climate change issues. Tiburon believes the long/short approach is best suited to take advantage of regional and sub-sector valuation discrepancies and will help protect investors capital during potential declines in what has been a highly volatile sector.
Rather than following the “green only” route the mandate of Tiburon Terra encompasses natural resources as well as renewable energy. We believe the two are inextricably linked - alternative energy is, afterall, only another way to produce electricity albeit in a cleaner fashion than that produced by coal or natural gas. Consequently Tiburon Terra will also take advantage of arbitrage opportunities that arise between renewables and companies in the natural resource sector. In addition, specific resources are fundamental to the development of renewable energy - rare earths or the technology metals are essential for the development of electric cars, smart grids, wind turbines, nuclear reactors, solar panels and environmental purification processes.
With China likely to contribute 63% of total global incremental emissions by 2020, its participation is a must to make a meaningful difference in emission levels even if the rest of the world cuts unilaterally. One of the key routes China will have to follow in reducing its carbon emissions is by reducing its coal consumption. This has clearly provided the impetus for China’s unprecedented thrust towards nuclear and renewable energy. Opportunities to exploit this are clear: we believe there is a good arbitrage between stocks like Yingli Green, a low cost PV solar module manufacturer, on the one hand and Shanghai Electric, a power generator heavily reliant on coal fired generation, on the other. Both stocks are trading at roughly the same projected P/E multiples in 2011. So too with nuclear: as an alternate form of energy that will provide an increasing share of incremental base-load generation in China, India and the rest of Asia, we believe stocks such as Dongfang, Cameco and Silex are all exciting prospects.
China is also central to rare earths or technology metals. Not only is it the dominant supplier of these rare but vital elements but it has proved to be acquisitive when new deposits have been identified outside its borders. Chinese entities have taken minority stakes in Australian mining groups Lynas Corp and Arafura Resources with predictable results for the stock prices.
We believe that electric vehicles will play a transformative role in transportation and may account for as many as 1 out of 10 new cars sold globally in 10 years. However, instead of investing in an over hyped and overvalued hybrid car battery maker like BYD, which trades at an eye watering 76x next years earnings, we have invested in Galaxy Resources which provides Lithium Carbonate, the mineral essential in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, for a more modest 12x earnings once mine production is stabilised.
Clearly the renewable concept has been around for some time but with targets set for 2020 it has in the past been consigned to the pending tray. Now however it is gathering momentum and is investible. Forget the idea that oil has to go back to USD150 before these new technologies and applications become viable: the major alternative energy technologies (wind and solar) have advanced meaningfully down their cost decline curves whereby they are either at (in the case of wind) or very near (in the case of solar) grid electricity rates. These technologies have already been embraced by major corporations and have moved mainstream and Tiburon Terra is well placed to capitalise.
Ethiopian Farms Lure Investor Funds as Workers Live in Poverty Share Business
By Jason McLure
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Until last year, people in the Ethiopian settlement of Elliah earned a living by farming their land and fishing. Now, they are employees.
Dozens of women and children pack dirt into bags for palm seedlings along the banks of the Baro River, seedlings whose oil will be exported to India and China. They work for Bangalore- based Karuturi Global Ltd., which is leasing 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of local land, an area larger than Luxembourg.
The jobs pay less than the World Bank’s $1.25-per-day poverty threshold, even as the project has the potential to enrich international investors with annual earnings that the company expects to exceed $100 million by 2013.
“My business is the third wave of outsourcing,” Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, the 44-year-old managing director of Karuturi Global, said at the company’s dusty office in the western town of Gambella. “Everyone is investing in China for manufacturing; everyone is investing in India for services. Everybody needs to invest in Africa for food.”
Companies and governments are buying or leasing African land after cereals prices almost tripled in the three years ended April 2008. Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Ethiopia alone have approved 1.4 million hectares of land allocations to foreign investors since 2004, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.
Emergent Asset Management Ltd.’s African Agricultural Land Fund opened last year. On Nov. 23, Moscow-based Pharos Financial Advisors Ltd. and Dubai-based Miro Asset Management Ltd. announced the creation of a $350 million private equity fund to invest in agriculture in developing countries.
‘Last Frontier’
“African agricultural land is cheap relative to similar land elsewhere; it is probably the last frontier,” said Paul Christie, marketing director at Emergent Asset Management in London. The hedge fund manager has farm holdings in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
“I am amazed it has taken this long for people to realize the opportunities of investing in African agriculture,” Christie said.
Monsoon Capital of Bethesda, Maryland, and Boston-based Sandstone Capital are among the shareholders of Karuturi Global, Karuturi said. The company is also the world’s largest producer of roses, with flower farms in India, Kenya and Ethiopia.
One advantage to starting a plantation 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the border with war-torn Southern Sudan and a four- day drive to the nearest port: The land is free. Under the agreement with Ethiopia’s government, Karuturi pays no rent for the land for the first six years. After that, it will pay 15 birr (U.S. $1.18) per hectare per year for the next 84 years.
More Elsewhere
Land of similar quality in Malaysia and Indonesia would cost about $350 per hectare per year, and tracts of that size aren’t available in Karuturi Global’s native India, Karuturi said.
Labor costs of less than $50 a month per worker and duty- free treaties with China and India also attracted Karuturi Global, he said. The $100 million projected annual profit will come from the export of food crops, including corn, rice and palm oil, he said. The company also is plowing land on a 10,900- hectare spread near the central Ethiopian town of Bako.
The project will give the government revenue from corporate income taxes and from future leases, as well as from job creation, said Omod Obang Olom, president of Ethiopia’s Gambella region and an ally of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party.
“This strategy will build up capitalism,” he said in an interview in Gambella. “The message I want to convey is there is room for any investor. We have very fertile land, there is good labor here, we can support them.” The government plans to allot 3 million hectares, or about 4 percent of its arable land, to foreign investors over the next three years.
Surprised Workers
Workers in Elliah say they weren’t consulted on the deal to lease land around the village, and that not much of the money is trickling down.
At a Karuturi site 20 kilometers from Elliah, more than a dozen tractors clear newly burned savannah for a corn crop to be planted in June. Omeud Obank, 50, guards the site 24 hours a day, six days a week. The job helps support his family of 10 on a salary of 600 birr per month, more than the 450 birr he earned monthly as a soldier in the Ethiopian army.
Obank said it isn’t enough to adequately feed and clothe his family.
“These Indians do not have any humanity,” he said, speaking of his employers. “Just because we are poor it doesn’t make us less human.”
One Meal
Obang Moe, a 13-year-old who earns 10 birr per day working part-time in a nursery with 105,000 palm seedlings, calls her work “a tough job.” While the cash income supplements her family’s income from their corn plot, she said that many days they still only have enough food for one meal.
The fact that the project is based on a wage level below the World Bank’s poverty limit is “quite remarkable,” said Lorenzo Cotula, a researcher with the London-based IIED.
Large-scale export-oriented plantations may keep farmers from accessing productive resources in countries such as Ethiopia, where 13.7 million people depend on foreign food aid, according to a June report by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food. It called for ensuring that revenue from land contracts be “sufficient to procure food in volumes equivalent to those which are produced for exports.”
Karuturi said his company pays its workers at least Ethiopia’s minimum wage of 8 birr, and abides by Ethiopia’s labor and environmental laws.
‘Easily Exploitable’
“We have to be very, very cognizant of the fact that we are dealing with people who are easily exploitable,” he said, adding that the company will create up to 20,000 jobs and has plans to build a hospital, a cinema, a school and a day-care center in the settlement. “We’re going to have a very healthy township that we will build. We are creating jobs where there were none.” The project may help cover part of the $44 billion a year that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says must be invested in agriculture in poor nations to halve the number of the world’s hungry people by 2015.
“We keep saying the big problem is, you need investment in African agriculture; well here are a load of guys who for whatever reason want to invest,” David Hallam, deputy director of the FAO’s trade and markets division, said in an interview in Rome. “So the question is, is it possible to sort of steer it toward forms of investment that are going to be beneficial?”
Buntin Buli, a 21-year-old supervisor at the nursery who earns 600 birr a month, said he hopes Karuturi will use some of its earnings to improve working conditions and provide housing and food. “Otherwise we would have been better off working on our own lands,” he said. “This is a society that has been very primitive. We want development.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at abolleurs
Dec. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Until last year, people in the Ethiopian settlement of Elliah earned a living by farming their land and fishing. Now, they are employees.
Dozens of women and children pack dirt into bags for palm seedlings along the banks of the Baro River, seedlings whose oil will be exported to India and China. They work for Bangalore- based Karuturi Global Ltd., which is leasing 300,000 hectares (741,000 acres) of local land, an area larger than Luxembourg.
The jobs pay less than the World Bank’s $1.25-per-day poverty threshold, even as the project has the potential to enrich international investors with annual earnings that the company expects to exceed $100 million by 2013.
“My business is the third wave of outsourcing,” Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, the 44-year-old managing director of Karuturi Global, said at the company’s dusty office in the western town of Gambella. “Everyone is investing in China for manufacturing; everyone is investing in India for services. Everybody needs to invest in Africa for food.”
Companies and governments are buying or leasing African land after cereals prices almost tripled in the three years ended April 2008. Ghana, Madagascar, Mali and Ethiopia alone have approved 1.4 million hectares of land allocations to foreign investors since 2004, according to the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.
Emergent Asset Management Ltd.’s African Agricultural Land Fund opened last year. On Nov. 23, Moscow-based Pharos Financial Advisors Ltd. and Dubai-based Miro Asset Management Ltd. announced the creation of a $350 million private equity fund to invest in agriculture in developing countries.
‘Last Frontier’
“African agricultural land is cheap relative to similar land elsewhere; it is probably the last frontier,” said Paul Christie, marketing director at Emergent Asset Management in London. The hedge fund manager has farm holdings in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
“I am amazed it has taken this long for people to realize the opportunities of investing in African agriculture,” Christie said.
Monsoon Capital of Bethesda, Maryland, and Boston-based Sandstone Capital are among the shareholders of Karuturi Global, Karuturi said. The company is also the world’s largest producer of roses, with flower farms in India, Kenya and Ethiopia.
One advantage to starting a plantation 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the border with war-torn Southern Sudan and a four- day drive to the nearest port: The land is free. Under the agreement with Ethiopia’s government, Karuturi pays no rent for the land for the first six years. After that, it will pay 15 birr (U.S. $1.18) per hectare per year for the next 84 years.
More Elsewhere
Land of similar quality in Malaysia and Indonesia would cost about $350 per hectare per year, and tracts of that size aren’t available in Karuturi Global’s native India, Karuturi said.
Labor costs of less than $50 a month per worker and duty- free treaties with China and India also attracted Karuturi Global, he said. The $100 million projected annual profit will come from the export of food crops, including corn, rice and palm oil, he said. The company also is plowing land on a 10,900- hectare spread near the central Ethiopian town of Bako.
The project will give the government revenue from corporate income taxes and from future leases, as well as from job creation, said Omod Obang Olom, president of Ethiopia’s Gambella region and an ally of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s ruling party.
“This strategy will build up capitalism,” he said in an interview in Gambella. “The message I want to convey is there is room for any investor. We have very fertile land, there is good labor here, we can support them.” The government plans to allot 3 million hectares, or about 4 percent of its arable land, to foreign investors over the next three years.
Surprised Workers
Workers in Elliah say they weren’t consulted on the deal to lease land around the village, and that not much of the money is trickling down.
At a Karuturi site 20 kilometers from Elliah, more than a dozen tractors clear newly burned savannah for a corn crop to be planted in June. Omeud Obank, 50, guards the site 24 hours a day, six days a week. The job helps support his family of 10 on a salary of 600 birr per month, more than the 450 birr he earned monthly as a soldier in the Ethiopian army.
Obank said it isn’t enough to adequately feed and clothe his family.
“These Indians do not have any humanity,” he said, speaking of his employers. “Just because we are poor it doesn’t make us less human.”
One Meal
Obang Moe, a 13-year-old who earns 10 birr per day working part-time in a nursery with 105,000 palm seedlings, calls her work “a tough job.” While the cash income supplements her family’s income from their corn plot, she said that many days they still only have enough food for one meal.
The fact that the project is based on a wage level below the World Bank’s poverty limit is “quite remarkable,” said Lorenzo Cotula, a researcher with the London-based IIED.
Large-scale export-oriented plantations may keep farmers from accessing productive resources in countries such as Ethiopia, where 13.7 million people depend on foreign food aid, according to a June report by Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food. It called for ensuring that revenue from land contracts be “sufficient to procure food in volumes equivalent to those which are produced for exports.”
Karuturi said his company pays its workers at least Ethiopia’s minimum wage of 8 birr, and abides by Ethiopia’s labor and environmental laws.
‘Easily Exploitable’
“We have to be very, very cognizant of the fact that we are dealing with people who are easily exploitable,” he said, adding that the company will create up to 20,000 jobs and has plans to build a hospital, a cinema, a school and a day-care center in the settlement. “We’re going to have a very healthy township that we will build. We are creating jobs where there were none.” The project may help cover part of the $44 billion a year that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says must be invested in agriculture in poor nations to halve the number of the world’s hungry people by 2015.
“We keep saying the big problem is, you need investment in African agriculture; well here are a load of guys who for whatever reason want to invest,” David Hallam, deputy director of the FAO’s trade and markets division, said in an interview in Rome. “So the question is, is it possible to sort of steer it toward forms of investment that are going to be beneficial?”
Buntin Buli, a 21-year-old supervisor at the nursery who earns 600 birr a month, said he hopes Karuturi will use some of its earnings to improve working conditions and provide housing and food. “Otherwise we would have been better off working on our own lands,” he said. “This is a society that has been very primitive. We want development.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jason McLure in Addis Ababa via the Johannesburg bureau at abolleurs
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