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Don’t let market volatility blind you to long-term investment opportunities. Asian infrastructure could be a global megatrend for years to come - find
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Original Message
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Sep 18, 2008
[link to www.moneyweek.com]
Frank Holmes is the CEO of US Global Investors, a money management firm honed in on the commodity bull market. I had dinner with him recently at the Blue Water Cafe in Vancouver. Over salmon and flying squid, as well as an excellent local ale, we again hashed out the big-picture themes of today’s markets.
Investors are always on the lookout for the next big thing. You know the sort, a big-picture idea so powerful and long-lasting that you can confidently ride your investments through the ups and downs that market life presents. Holmes calls these “global megatrends” — “sustainable and substantial growth in capital expenditures in any country or sector.”
Holmes offered a couple of past examples. There was the massive growth of infrastructure in the ‘50s and ‘60s, which included the postwar rebuilding of Europe and the massive highway system build-out in the us There was the 1990s megatrend, which led to massive growth in information technology and data communications. And there is the present megatrend: “Unprecedented change in global growth driven by globalization, urbanization and wealth creation, [which] leads to a global infrastructure boom on a massive, intractable scale.”
That’s quite a mouthful, but I believe Holmes is right. Holmes also cites numerous studies — one by Booz Allen Hamilton, as well as ones by World Energy Outlook, the US Department of Transportation, the OECD and a host of other official-sounding places. But the total bill, give or take a few trillion, is about $41 trillion out to 2030 - for water, power, roads and bridges, as well as marine and seaports.
This is your next megatrend. Don’t miss it. We have some ideas at work here, but before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s look again at some of the key points of the thesis.
First, some mega population shifts. By the end of 2008, half of the world’s people will live in urban areas. Leading the way are some 500 million Chinese and another 540 million Indians. The world’s cities are getting a lot bigger. Beijing alone grew from 12 million to 16 million in the past decade. Plus, there are a lot more souls on the orb than ever — 6 billion of us. Next year, the world’s total urban population alone will exceed the total world population in 1965.
This helps drive economic growth. Asia as a whole, for example, is building five times more homes than the US. Incredibly, China alone is constructing 80 percent of them. This, in turn, drives consumption of many commodities, including things you may not think of immediately — like cement. Asia — excluding Japan — uses about 14 times as much cement as the US. Asia ex-Japan has also overtaken the US in steel production by a country mile. Asian steel production is more than six times the US. Electricity consumption is 32 percent more than the US.
I could go on like this for pages…the stats are simply amazing. But I think you get the idea. The industrialization of Asia’s enormous populations has unleashed a torrent of demand for the basics.
There was a lot of discussion at the conference in Vancouver about just how much of Asia’s economic growth begins with us consumers. The answer isn’t clear, as you might expect. But it is clear that trade routes in Asia are flourishing. I’ve talked about the New Silk Road before. It’s one of my favorite themes — the opening of old trade routes that stretch across the Middle East through India and into China. Holmes had a chart that showed that the Asian stretch of that old road is still healthy — despite an economic slowdown in the us
Asian trade is ticking up, even as us exports take a dip. It’s not the only data point, either. Asian retail sales are also trending higher as us retail sales head lower. I think it’s a bit arrogant on the part of some analysts to say that China exists to satisfy our needs for rubber toys and cheap underwear. In their view, a US slowdown dooms most of Asia’s export-driven economies. Plenty of evidence shows that’s not the case, at least not yet.
In fact, Asian demand is on the rise for a whole host of goods. In 2008, vehicle sales in Asia ex-Japan are set to exceed those in the US. First time that’s ever happened. Sometime in 2008, also for the first time ever, there will be more Internet subscribers in China than in the US. I suspect that’s one top spot that the US will never claim again. There are also four times the number of mobile subscribers in Asia than in the US.
All of these points come from Holmes presentation, which I think painted an amazing panorama of the truly historic shifts in the global economy.
As fast as the Asian economies are growing, their demand for power is growing faster. You can also expect to see increasing use of aluminum, copper, iron ore, coal and nickel — all basic infrastructure materials.
Holmes offered that to satisfy the global demand for copper, the world would need to mine as much in the next 25 years as it has up to this point in history. These predictions may prove wildly inaccurate. But even if they are only directionally correct, it points to a long bull market in the basics.
I have recommended stocks that are deeply involved in the megatrend of infrastructure. Companies like ABB Ltd. (NYSE:ABB), the world’s largest builder of power grids, and Astec Industries (NASDAQ:ASTE), a leading manufacture of road-building equipment. Plus, I have also recommended companies that own the basic commodities the world will need — copper, oil, natural gas and more.
As we come to learn early in our investing careers, the market seldom moves in a straight line. Years can separate cause and effect. One of the great megatrends in the market today is this idea of infrastructure and all that it entails. So don’t let the recent volatility in the stock market blind you to long-term investment opportunities.
These are the moments to enter the fray, not to run from it.
By Chris Mayer for Whiskey and Gunpowder
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