Friday 2nd November, 2012

If you ever doubted the professional in me you should be reassured by the fact that I have nipped back to the office from our London Conference whizzing down Piccadilly and round Hyde Park Corner on my trusty Boris Bike....just to send you this and wish you a good weekend. The conference, though I say it myself, has been a great success. CLSA eat your heart out. 38 Asian leaders in a West End hotel. Tony Fernandes entertaining us over lunch with a rivetting run through his career to date. Indonesian trade minister. Prosecco. Duck pancakes. A magician AND....music from the Coutures, aka Three Girls from Essex. Oh and a little too much Soju, a drink of which even a little is too much. I also got carried away with a small Indian company.....be warned this last time this happened to me was when I was reluctantly dragged into a meeting with Inspur at a HK Forum and came out Inspired. It has been a sorry tale since then. But this one is different. Really worth a look..... Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri (TBZL IN) - If you can't get your tongue around this company's name don't worry. Call it TBZ. But remember this one. Its only US$220 m market cap but that is changing fast. It has doubled in the last few months and I am pretty sure it is going to do the same again in the next few. It is a play on the rising Indian middle class and its insatiable appetite for jewellery. The critical transformation for this company which for close on a 100 years was a Bombay based wedding jewellery specialist designer, manufacturer and retailer was the decision to switch business model to gold leasing. Think of it as going asset light. Instead of being exposed to gold price volatility and restriction imposed by holding inventory this has allowed it to pursue a dramatic growth strategy transforming itself into a pan Indian company building on its renowned reputation. Now, instead of people trecking to Mumbai to buy their jewellery TBZ is going to them. By end FY15 they will have 57 stores from the current 12 dotted in urban centres all over India and these stores are profitable almost from the outset. Average sales is 300,000 rupees per sq ft. Average billing size is 150,000 rupees. Nothing else in retailing in India comes close. CAGR over last 5 years of like for like gold sales has been 8% and for diamonds (25% of sales) it has been 28%. Add on top the store expansion and you have a stellar growth story. Take a look. So it's been a long week and I have to get back to the conference, but just quickly have to tell you about my trip to Edinburgh on Wednesday where, would you believe, on 31st October, the Christmas trees are up. Anyway, as you know I have various little tricks to keep me engaged during meetings. If I'm with a Chinese company and in front of a client who is a Mandarin speaker I encourage them to conduct the meeting in their own language. Truth is I like listening to Mandarin. When I was with Barings in HK I actually had lessons for a few months and our teacher invariably praised me for my accent which I was quite pleased about. So now one of my little querks is to wait until, with the help of the occasional bit of English that always crops into business talk, I can guess what they are discussing and then chip in with a casual pertinent comment of my own. Fun eh!? Anyway the conversation over lunch was in full flow at the point, I was sure they were discussing various private equity investment firms operating in China. I decided the time was right to launch my attempt to make them think I understood everything they were saying and asked how they selected which firm to work with? They looked at me blankly. "Sorry. We are talking about pineapple cakes" I was told. Busted. After that every now and again, as I reached for another sip of house red, they would break off and with a sympathetic nod in my direction explain they were talking about the Taiwanese financial industry. Hey ho. At least I have the consolation that I can speak more Cantonese than my lunch partner's colleague who, after living in Hong Kong for close on 10 years, can only manage four words....Gung Hei Fat Choi. Pip pip.