Please feel free to forward this newsletter to any colleagues you think might be interested in receiving it. We also appreciate your privacy, so please unsubscribe at the bottom of this newsletter if you would rather not hear from us.

Kate Horn // Director // www.foglamp.org

Direct: +1 914.682.4127 // Cell: +1 914.806.5285

kate.horn@foglamp.org

In this issue

FOGLAMP INSIGHT: Single Brand Retailing – INDIA

FOGLAMP SERVICE: Weekly or Monthly Foglamp Market Updates

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILE: Our Teams on the Ground

Foglamp Insight

SINGLE BRAND RETAILING – INDIA

The Government of India recently further opened the country’s retail sector to foreign investment: the allowable foreign direct investment (FDI) of single brand retailing in India has increased from 51% to 100%. With the removal of the 51% investment cap, single-brand foreign companies (think Apple, Nike, or Gucci) can now compete in the retail market without domestic partners.

Supporters of the policy argue that increased investment and competition from foreign companies will result in increased employment, improved quality, and reduced prices. They also claim that attracting foreign capital and technology will modernize the retail sector through improved supply chain management and distribution infrastructure. Domestic small and medium enterprises also stand to benefit, as the policy requires all foreign single brand retailers to source 30% of goods locally and invest in infrastructure.

Opponents argue that opening the retail sector to foreign competition will kill domestic businesses and local independent retailers. This is the domestic equivalent of small-town grocers and shopkeepers arguing to keep Walmart out of their town.

Given the change in the regulatory environment, we thought it would be interesting to hear what senior managers from leading retail companies in India think will be the effects of the new policy. Leveraging our team of local Foglamp contributors in India, we asked them to identify the retail companies (domestic and/or foreign) that stand to win and lose because of the recent policy change. Here is a brief synopsis of the chatter we heard:

1. Unsurprisingly, expert views on winners and losers in broad categories such as ‘local retailers’ vs. ‘single brand foreign retailers’ were mixed. Some argued that local retailers would benefit most, while others argued the opposite. Some forecasted no effect at all. What is most interesting is the attention paid to the policy requirement of local sourcing as the driver of their forecasts. Specifically, some experts cited the advantage enjoyed by local retailers of having established networks to source local goods. On the other hand, others argued that the increase in competition for local goods would harm local retailers.

2. There was a general consensus that foreign and domestic retailers across various subsectors would benefit from FDI in some way. Groceries/Food/ Beverages/Supermarkets and Health/Beauty subsectors were noted as potential top gainers. Among domestic food retail brands, predicted big winners included Spencer’s Daily and Nilgiri’s. Foreign food predicted winners were Starbucks (SBUX) and fast food chains including McDonald’s (MCD), KFC (YUM), and Domino’s Pizza (DPZ). In the Health/Beauty segment, predicted domestic winners included Lakme and Big Bazaar. The predicted foreign winner was Body Shop (OR: EN).

3. Home Furnishings, Apparel/Footwear and Jewelry/Accessories were all indicated as subsectors that would benefit from the change in investment policy. The predicted big domestic winner in Home Furnishing was Godrej, and the foreign winner IKEA. As for Apparel, many experts mentioned domestic firms Pantaloons and FabIndia. The top predicted foreign winner was LVMH (MC:FP). In the Jewelry sector, two domestic winners were consistently identified: Tanishq and Gitanjali.

4. Nearly all experts identified Food Processing, Logistics/Shipping/Transportation and Commercial Real Estate Development as related industries that would benefit from spillover effects of the new policy. Specifically, senior retail managers identified Snowman, a domestic food processing company, and Gati, a domestic shipping company, as potential big winners. A large number of interviewees forecasted high growth in commercial real estate development, particularly in companies that build malls such as the multinational corporation GVK Group.

5. Identifying potential losers was more difficult than picking winners. We heard little chatter in this area, presumably because most senior managers felt the change in policy would benefit domestic and foreign companies alike. One trend we did track was the mention of small domestic Indian firms, particularly in the unorganized sector, as potential losers. Although difficult to define, the Government of India describes this sector as having a low scale of organization, typically family-owned/household enterprises that are unregulated and unprotected.

6. When asked whether they thought the Government of India would allow a majority foreign stake in multi-brand retailers (for example, Tesco or Carrefour) in the next two years, the majority said yes because FDI is beneficial for most parties (though a sizeable number of managers interviewed were more skeptical). The most commonly cited reason for this was the upcoming election period and the sensitivity of FDI as a political lightening rod in India.

For better or worse, the change in policy regarding FDI in Single Brand Retail in India has many looking to the future. Leaders in the industry are predicting winners and losers and accordingly, working towards keeping their businesses competitive.

If you would like this type of information on a specific topic of your own interest, please get in touch with us at Foglamp!

Weekly or Monthly Foglamp Market Updates

Is there a research topic or investment idea that you need in-country assistance fleshing out? Is the outcome of an upcoming political election or regulatory event important to your decision making process?

Our on the ground teams can keep you updated with data and information from in-country sources on a regular basis to help you stay informed about companies, country regulation, political risk and other issues of your choosing. In line with our mission to provide clients with on-demand, customizable in-country research, our regular “Foglamp Market Updates” help investors, consultants and managers get a snapshot and better understand specific market realities.

Contributor Profile: Our Teams on the Ground

Foglamp continues to see interest in Russia. Whether it be due diligence work on corporate executives or industry surveys and market information, clients want and need to better understand the issues and risks prevalent in Russia.

This Foglamp contributor holds a Ph. D. in Economics with experience in banking and finance, energy and consulting. This contributor has worked on numerous client projects for Foglamp and can utilize contacts to help research and verify information on a range of topics including state owned media, distribution and supply chain, as well as oil and oil and gas services.

About Foglamp

Foglamp is a customizable in-country research service providing clients with access to a network of more than 1,300 on-the-ground information miners in more than 120 countries. Our research is provided in the form of short memos, surveys, interviews, and market research; by reaching out to a range of market participants, clients are able to glean insights from dozens of local managers rather than just one or two industry experts. Our network of field contributors can be used for due diligence work, market scanning, and other in-country research activities to help clients in geographies where resources are difficult to find. Please see our website at www.foglamp.org for more information and contact us (kate.horn@foglamp.org ) to schedule a follow-up conversation.

The future of Blackberry in Emerging and Frontier Markets

Despite many analysts writing off Research in Motion (TSE:RIM)and its Blackberry smartphones as “basically dead in the US and Europe,” [1] the company remains optimistic that its devices will continue to do well given RIM’s ability to capture and maintain its position in emerging markets overseas.Since we work regularly in those geographies, we were curious to test our hunch that RIM might be overstating its ability to survive in its current form by simply selling more and more cheap handsets in emerging and frontier markets. So we asked a number of our field contributors in several disparate markets around the world to have some quick-and-dirty conversations with consumers to get a sense of their preferences for mobile devices.  The highlights of their conversations with 1,500 respondents from six countries — three in Africa (Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa) and three in Asia (China, India, and Thailand) — are below.

What mobile phones are people using in Africa and Asia?  What phones do they want to use and/or plan to purchase and why?

Foglamp field contributors took to the streets with a short questionnaire asking those questions of consumers in their home markets. Not intended to be a statistically significant sample, our conversations with consumers were instead a rapid one-week dipstick approach to better understand how cost, satisfaction levels, and features played into their current and future choices of mobile devices. Full results can be downloaded here as a spreadsheet.Unsurprisingly, smart phone usage varied across the countries, with Nigerian and South African consumers being the more frequent users of Blackberry devices. Thai consumers seem to enjoy their iPhones, with the Chinese consumers being Android fans (certainly a good sign for Samsung (SEO:005930), HTC (TPE:2498), Huawei, LG (NYSE:LG), and other major Android handset manufacturers). If nothing else, these findings are a helpful reminder that “emerging markets” are not a monolithic black box of preferences; they instead represent radically different countries with different prospects and consumer trends.What might be more interesting is which phones consumers aren’t using in these markets. In our conversations, Apple’s(NASDAQ:AAPL) iPhone was the only smart phone to register a sizeable presence (in terms of current usage) across all markets. Blackberry’s presence in China was negligible, at least in our quick exchanges.When asked about what phone they planned to purchase next, the results tracked with the current choice of phone. Conversations with consumers did not suggest a mass exodus from consumers’ current platforms. A modest exception was in India, where respondents often identified Blackberry as the next preferred phone.

Wither Blackberry? Our results, while again not statistically significant, do raise interesting questions about RIM’s future in emerging and frontier markets that deserve deeper research and surveying. Certainly RIM has a presence in a number of large and growing emerging markets. And the company is unlikely to see a massive drop in its user base in those countries in the short-term. Even after removing cost as a factor for next phone considerations, consumers in half the countries preferred Blackberry the most. But we also saw no noticeable fervor for Blackberry devices. On the whole, iPhone remains quite a bit more popular than Blackberry when discounting cost as a consideration.  For those consumers that preferred iPhone, superior aesthetics, ease of use, and variety of features/apps were commonly cited reasons. As cheaper and more feature-rich Android devices flood these markets in the coming years, and as rumors of an iPhone Nano or other low-end iPhone continue to swirl, the question remains: can RIM actually grow its market share in emerging markets to offset major losses in North America and Europe? The company’s future might depend on it.

[1] http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-16/tech/30006699_1_markets-playbook-tablet-rim

New Foglamp Service: Market Chatter

The release of these results marks the launch of a new service from Foglamp: Market Chatter.  In line with our mission to provide clients with on-demand, customizable in-country research, Market Chatter helps investors, consultants and managers test their hunches through affordable, rapid exchanges with market participants in more than 120 emerging and frontier markets. Client requests for Market Chatter can typically be launched within 48 – 72 hours at a fraction of the cost of traditional market research in more than 100 markets simultaneously. Through rapid-fire man-on-the-street conversations, our field contributors can provide clients with real-time insight into market trends and consumer preferences. While not designed to yield statistically significant results, we have found increased demand from clients for this type of rapid primary data collection that is helpful for testing out investment theses and “scratching an itch.”

Contributor Profile: Our Teams on the Ground

Foglamp has seen an increased demand for information in and about China, and our growing roster of Chinese contributors is always available to assist clients across a broad spectrum of projects.  This Foglamp contributor is an independent consultant with a Masters in Journalism from the University of British Columbia.  She has worked as a news researcher, a market research analyst, and a broadcast journalist internationally and in China.  She travels extensively for us on assignments from her home base in Beijing and has contacts in numerous industries that she reaches out to as requested.

Foglamp is a customizable in-country research service providing clients with access to a network of on-the-ground information miners in more than 120 countries.  Most of our research is provided in the form of short memos; by reaching out to a range of market participants, clients are able to glean insights from dozens of local managers rather than just one or two industry experts. Our network of field contributors can be used for due diligence work, market scanning, and other in-country research activities to help clients in geographies where resources are difficult to find. Please see our website at www.foglamp.org for more information and contact us (info@foglamp.org) to schedule a follow-up conversation.

Foglamp founder Nathaniel Heller; credit: New York Times

Foglamp’s unique approach to working with investors was recently profiled in The New York Times as, “A new type of company intended to put social goals ahead of making profits…”

Global Integrity, is likely to spin off a project called Foglamp, which it started, into a flexible-purpose company. Foglamp has a worldwide network of 1,200 people that provide research, for example, on a country’s political stability. Hedge funds, institutional investors and global companies pay market rates for the information.

Nathaniel Heller, Global Integrity’s managing director, said that on at least two occasions recently, it had to turn away venture capitalists wanting to invest in Foglamp. “As a nonprofit, we have no equity to offer them,” Mr. Heller said.

That means, he said, that Foglamp can only grow “arithmetically, not geometrically.” He added, “As a nonprofit, we don’t have extra cash sitting around that would allow us to hire five more employees for Foglamp.”

Read the full story here.

– Kate Horn, Director, Foglamp (kate.horn@foglamp.org)

In this issue

FOGLAMP INSIGHT: Trends in Chinese government healthcare spending

WHAT WE’RE HEARING: The latest chatter on overseas investment

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILE: Our teams on the ground – Nigeria

FOGLAMP INSIGHT: Trends in Chinese government healthcare spending

Healthcare Spending in China

The majority of China’s health care costs are borne by individual Chinese citizens. In 2009 the Chinese government contributed 24.7% of total health expenditures, far below the average of 75% in developed countries and 55% in developing countries.

The New Health Care Reform Plan outlines how the Chinese government will spend RMB 850 billion (100 RMB equaled $15.42 on June 26, 2011) from 2009 to 2011 to reform the country’s healthcare system. This plan is aimed at benefiting the poor by increasing coverage and improving the availability of key medical equipment.

The government spent RMB 149 billion on healthcare in 2010 with RMB 22.5 billion spent on local-level healthcare infrastructure and RMB 29.6 billion on major public health programs. This figure does not include local-government healthcare budgets for infrastructure construction, medical equipment procurement, and hospital capacity enhancement. The government estimates it will spend RMB 172.8 billion on health care in 2011, up 16% from 2010.

China’s Healthcare Spending Priorities

Government spending on healthcare will be significant in the coming years across three priority areas:

Subsidy Programs

Through the New Rural Cooperative Medical Care System and the Urban Worker’s Health Insurance System, 90% of peasants and unemployed urban residents are covered with basic health care services (835 million under NRCMCS and 196 million under URHI in 2010).  To ensure similar levels of participation, the government will spend RMB 140 billion more in 2011, increasing the direct subsidy from RMB 120 to RMB 200 per person and raising the percentage reimbursed for hospitalizations.

Healthcare Infrastructure construction

The government spent more than RMB 40 billion during 2009 and 2010 to support the construction of 1,877 county-level hospitals, 5,169 town-level hospitals, 2,382 city community health centers, and more than 11,000 rural health centers. It also spent RMB 13 billion on the purchase of medical equipment in facilities. Officials indicate that spending figures will be far higher in 2011 on hospital construction, equipment procurement, and personnel training.

Reforming public hospitals

Most public hospitals in China are considered inefficient, corrupt, and expensive. To counter this perception, the government is placing a high priority on reforming public hospitals and is investing significant financial resources to reorganize hospital administration and pharmaceutical procurement systems.

Healthcare Reform and Investment Opportunities

Many industries are poised to benefit from the ongoing healthcare reform initiatives in China, including medical equipment, pharmaceutical, information technology, and health insurance companies.

Medical Equipment

According to industry experts and government officials, medical equipment providers have been the biggest beneficiaries of healthcare reform in China. The Ministry of Health will require all county- and town-level hospitals to maintain X-ray machines, CT scanners and cardio monitors. This represents a windfall for the industry, especially for local Chinese manufacturers, as imported medical equipment is expensive. A Ministry of Health official estimated that procurement of medical equipment in the country could reach RMB 100 billion for the period 2009 – 2011.

Pharmaceuticals

Many more Chinese will be able to afford medicines following the increases in government subsidies as a result of healthcare reforms. Experts predict that prices of basic medicines will increase, with many anticipating a “golden decade” of 15% – 20% growth for Chinese pharmaceutical companies.

Information Technology

The Chinese information technology industry will also benefit significantly as the government will need to invest heavily in IT hardware and services to implement many of the country’s healthcare reform proposals.

Health Insurance

The impact of reforms on the health insurance industry is uncertain. Burgeoning healthcare budgets point to future market opportunities for private insurance companies; however, currently the industry is tightly regulated and the government’s central role as an insurance provider crowds out investment by private insurance providers.

Conclusion

Despite the Chinese government undertaking large-scale reforms of its healthcare system, uncertainties remain. Central government budgets and healthcare policymaking are notoriously opaque. Despite these risks, the government’s commitment to reform and increased investment in the healthcare sector brings significant growth opportunities for Chinese and international companies over the next five years.

WHAT WE’RE HEARING: The latest chatter on overseas investment

Africa, Africa, Africa. That’s what we’ve been hearing and seeing lately in terms of investors’ and companies’ interest in overseas expansion and growth opportunities.  With a growing middle-class, rising levels of disposable income levels, and an emerging consumer class, a number of exciting markets in Africa are increasingly popping onto investors’ radars. We like Nigeria (huge market and booming middle-class; corruption concerns real but highly variable depending on the sector and vertical) and companies that can market and sell their goods and services seamlessly across East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania).  Morocco offers another intriguing though riskier opportunity.

Elsewhere, we see growing concern over non-economic trends in Mexico affecting long-term business opportunities (drug war spiraling out of control).  Brazil remains of interest but with increasing concern over inflation and other macro economic indicators. In Asia, the Philippines remain a popular destination for investors looking to diversify into a burgeoning emerging market in the region.

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILE: Our teams on the ground

In Nigeria we have a deep bench of contributors with contacts across numerous industries and verticals ready to assist clients.  This Foglamp contributor has a Masters in Communications Studies and is an award-winning journalist as well as a business and economics editor for a major local news organization.  He has covered a range of industries and has performed investigative work on everything from healthcare, travel and leisure, energy (oil and gas), to local internet companies.  His research capabilities have proven valuable to clients wanting help with due diligence as well as those interested in understanding new market dynamics.

The Transneft controversy has only heightened interest in Mr. Navalny’s blog. He has since branched out from shareholder activism, creating RosPil.info, a new Web site about corruption in the government procurement process. It posts documents about state tenders and asks for public input on matters like the fairness of the prices or the deadlines.

Africa had a bad reputation in business circles. Of course some African countries have issues but the vast numbers of countries are actually okay. So the perception of Africa is much worse than the reality. And whenever there is gap between perception and reality there’s a fantastic business opportunity.

Full story is here.

In this issue

FOGLAMP INSIGHT: Exploding demand for cell phone towers in Brazil

WHAT WE’RE HEARING: The latest chatter on overseas investment

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILE: Our teams on the ground

FOGLAMP INSIGHT: Exploding demand for cell phone towers in Brazil

COMPANIES MENTIONED

Telecoms: Vivo, Claro,TIM, Oi. Service Providers: Relacom, Embratel, QiS Engenharia

With the increasing availability of spectrum-guzzling mobile devices, Brazil had witnessed a more than 15% increase in the rate of cell phone tower installations since 2008. São Paulo, the wealthiest state in the country, has seen towers go up at a rate close to 20%.  As those numbers increase, tower providers and operators able to keep pace with the exploding demand stand to benefit.

Shifting landscape

Brazil has 203 million cell phones for 185 million inhabitants, according to January 2011 figures from Anatel, the country’s telecommunications regulator. Most of those phones, up to 80% for some mobile operators, are cheap, prepaid devices – so-called “burners.” There are four major mobile phone operators in the country – Vivo (owned by the Spanish group Telefónica), Claro (owned by Mexico’s América Móvil), Oi (owned by the Brazilian group Telemar, with minority shareholders Portugal Telecom, the state-owned Brazilian development bank BNDES, and the pension funds of Brazilian civil servants) and TIM (owned by Telecom Itália).  In a country where more than 2,500 cities lack raw sewage collection, only 19 cities in Brazil lack cell phone coverage.

Currently, the largest share of cell towers in the country belongs to Oi. Oi controls 4 in every 10 towers in Brazil despite providing service for only 1 in five 5 mobile phones. Vivo, with nearly 3 in 10 mobile customers, controls 25% of the towers. Claro (18% of towers) and TIM (15% of towers) bring up the rear.

In 2010, Anatel announced important auctions of high-speed 4G wireless spectrum. That new spectrum will require both upgrades to existing cell phone towers as well as new towers. Meanwhile, due to rising real estate costs across much of the country, acquiring sites for new towers has quickly become more and more expensive. A number of mobile phone providers – especially TIM, which controls only 15% of the towers in Brazil despite servicing 25% of the phones – are increasingly talking in public about the need to share tower capacity.

Sharing infrastructure a solution to tower shortages?

In a press conference in December, TIM’s president Luca Luciani said that to meet growing demand for network capacity, Brazilian cell phone companies needed to ramp up tower installations immediately.  “It’s like trying to fit 3 million people in the Maracanã stadium. It’s possible to do it, but you’d need 50 floors of seats,” said Luciani. Claro’s president João Cox reckoned in 2009 that to properly handle demand for 3G services in the country, mobile operators would need twice as many towers as they needed when rolling out 2G coverage.  The looming 4G auctions will compound the problem further.

Currently, installing a new cell phone tower in Brazil can take up to four months due to the red tape involved in site acquisition. The cost of site acquisition is increasingly becoming a burden thanks to a booming real estate market. In São Paulo, for example, square meter prices have shot up 267% in some parts of the city. Both factors – red tape and high real estate prices – are encouraging the cell phone operators to try and share their networks and towers as much as possible.

A number of the major operators already share towers and backhaul infrastructure, although that cooperation is often limited. Claro, Vivo and Embratel are preparing a shared fiber optic ring to support their data transmission networks, but they still maintain competing voice networks. A 2010 study by AT Kearney argued that sharing networks in Brazil would not have a meaningful impact in reducing the network operating costs of the major carriers.

In December of 2009, Anatel convened a meeting of six of the major cell phone companies. Jarbas Valente, Anatel’s superintendent for private services, presented the carriers with a proposal: they could share a common physical network provided that the traffic was separated. As of January 2011, public comments were still being sought to determine the feasibility and conditions under which such a shared network strategy might be allowed to occur.

The immediate winners

In the meantime, more towers will have to go up across Brazil.  Most of the network installation and maintenance of towers is done by contractors on a turnkey basis: the contractors, and not the cell phone companies, are responsible for maintaining the towers from site acquisition to tower maintenance. Since the contractors usually work for most or all of the mobile operators, a possible move towards a shared infrastructure model could also reduce some of the contractors’ own costs.

The biggest tower contractor in Brazil is the Swedish company Relacom. Their clients include three out of the four largest cell phone operators: Telemar (Claro), Telefonica (Vivo) and TIM. Relacom is responsible for the maintenance of more than 3,000 towers in the country.

Oi, which controls the largest number of towers of all the carriers, doesn’t use Relacom’s services. Oi has traditionally worked with Nokia Siemens; Nokia Siemens was responsible for installing Oi’s 3G network, at the time the first 3G network in Brazil. In 2007, Oi hired Nokia Siemens executive Eduardo Smith to manage their in-house tower contractor, Serede. Serede focuses primarily on Rio de Janeiro, where Oi has its largest concentration of subscribers. At the time, they reported spending R$500 million (US$300 million at today’s rates) every year for outsourced network and cell tower maintenance services, contracting with 24,000 employees in 16 Brazilian states.

Tower contracts are scattered among many smaller contractors as well.  One of the better-known small contractors is Tel Telecomunicações, created in 2004 and based in São Paulo. The firm provides a variety of services for the big four operators: Oi (turnkey site implementation since 2007), Vivo (underground fiber optic networks), Claro (towers in São Paulo, Rio and Espírito Santo, as well as linking towers with fiber optic fibers) and TIM (fiber optic services in the Northeast).

The industry has grown at such a rate that the larger tower contractors are now sub-contacting services to small firms.  QiS Engenharia, for example, installs cables for Relacom, repais fiber optic cables for Telsul, and repairs phone lines for Lider Telecom.

Regulatory changes: battery requirements increased for towers

Two recent Anatel regulations (numbered 379 and 394) could cut into those burgeoning profits, however.   Those new rules increase the requirement for regular tests of the commercial-grade batteries used in towers to keep mobile services going in the event of a power outage. The telecom carriers are virtually the only users of those types of batteries – 80% to 90% of the batteries are purchased by the operators. According to technical experts at CPqD labs, resolution 394 increases the amount of required tests by 50% and requires that batteries be evaluated every three years.

Regardless of any eventual regulatory changes, there’s no indication that demand for tower infrastructure in Brazil will recede in the coming years.  For the firms best positioned to meet that demand, the future is bright.

WHAT WE’RE HEARING: The latest chatter on overseas investment

The Middle East and North Africa are not surprisingly on people’s minds.  What’s striking to us, however, is how unprepared many investors have been when it comes to having the resources and expertise in place to rapidly respond to and evaluate the tumult roiling the region.  While Foglamp has seen demand for research in markets such as Egypt and Morocco steadily increase in recent years, fewer investors have significant in-house contacts in those markets relative to their interest in quickly capitalizing on the continued rise of the consumer class in the region.  Given language and cultural barriers, perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising.  Foglamp has maintained and grown research teams in Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, and Yemen for several years, and we can attest to the fact that building relationships in those countries is far tougher than in most parts of the world.  We expect a growing number of both investors and operating companies to take a hard look at  the risks and the potential opportunities in these countries as industries like energy, transportation, consumer, and tourism are impacted by events as they unfold.

CONTRIBUTOR PROFILE: Our teams on the ground

This Foglamp expert maintains a focus on the impact of conflict on property rights and is currently a professor in political science and international studies at the University of the Philippines as well as a member of the Board of Trustees of ESCR Asia, Inc., an organization dedicated to the promotion of economic and cultural development in the Philippines.  He was formerly a professor in economics at the University of the Philippines and vice president for research and strategic studies at the National Defense College of the Philippines.  He has also been a visiting associate professor at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California-San Diego.

He has conducted research into civil resistance and democratization in the Philippines for an Oxford University Press volume and has published papers on the politics of property rights enforcement and protection in the Philippines. His other research interests focus on the interplay between the Philippines’ four economies (formal, informal, criminal, and war economies).

A new joint-donor study, led by the Technical Advisory Services and commissioned by the Embassy of Denmark, the World Bank, and the Embassy of Sweden in Vietnam “Recognizing and Reducing Corruption Risks in Land Management in Vietnam” systematically examines the process of obtaining a land-use rights certificate and the processes associated with land acquisition and allocation. The study identifies the policies that make corruption so profitable, and the challenges that make it so difficult to stop.

Although a dense report, this is a must-read for real estate investors and developers exploring opportunities in Vietnam.  Click here for the full report.

“Private equity firms are 10 years ahead of hedge funds in understanding the importance of vetting management teams in onsite due diligence”…But, unlike hedge funds, when it comes to compliance, “most firms are winging it.”

You can access the full interview here.