title: Scott Osheroff - Understanding the Uzbekistan Opportunity (Frontier Markets Episode #17)
author: Frontier Markets Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: Frontier Markets Podcast
published: 2023-08-29T04:00:00-04:00
sourceurl: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/6b8dced8-1a8c-4ac8-beaf-4c5c99c1f301/Pod-w-Scott-converted.mp3
word_count: 7671
Hello, and thank you for joining me on the Frontier Market podcast. My guest today is Scott Osharov. Scott has built a deep practitioner's understanding of some of the world's most interesting growth markets. These markets include Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar. He is currently a portfolio manager at the Asia Frontier Fund and he predominantly is focused on investing in Uzbekistan. Now Scott's story starts with a great once upon a time and so I would allow him to share the origin of his adventures and work in contributing to the development of Frontier markets. Scott, please. What do you have in mind? I'm from Laos Angeles, went to University in Boston and while I was in university in New York and Eastern, he was trying to figure out my past post-graduation. I had always been interested in the wealth accumulation that the baby boom generation and the states had accumulated and having an interest in Chinese culture and culture in order sense realized that I could step back in time and benefit from the same demographic trends that drove the wealth creation of baby boom generation by being an Asia. As if you look at people in their 20s and 30s and Asia, they are the baby boom generation of Asia. So I built a relationship with some venture capitalist based on New Zealand, Laos and University and we've been talking for year and a half every month or so and two weeks before I came to Asia, we decided to work together. They were investing in mainly Frontier Asia markets at the time and specifically Mongolia. So few weeks before I came to Asia, we agreed to build a Frontier markets media portal. So I flew to Singapore, worked my way through Southeast Asia and ended up Mongolia and we worked together for about a year and a half. I was between Mongolia and Cambodia and then afterwards we split up amicably and I was based in Cambodia sort of bouncing around there and Vietnam, trying to figure out what my next move was and I probably looked at 100 plus businesses, everything from importing cement into Cambodia, exporting wood chips to the EU from Eucalyptus plantations, real estate of course agricultural processing, whether it was mango processing, doing cashew processing, etc. Anything you could imagine I delved into. So I became rather well versed in a variety of different industries. Then in 2014, since I had met them before, I ended up formally starting to work with Asia Frontier capital. So I had met Thomas Wilbur, the founder of Asia Frontier capital. Back in 2012 when I transitioned from Mongolia down to Cambodia and we met at a conference and I believe it was May of 2014 and from there I became an analyst for Asia Frontier capital, Asia Frontier Fund, covering Indochina and Mongolia. Then I moved over to Vietnam since I never lived in Hong Kong, was always sort of remote. Lived in Hong Kong while I was working with Asia Frontier capital, I ended up building a coconut water brand which I was trying to trade into China and then I actually built a children's timeline which was in partnership with the third biggest dairy company in Vietnam based in Honoi. So yeah, was covering those regions, visiting companies, getting a better understanding of the capital markets, etc. And then in 2017 I went to Myanmar for an investor conference and for a public list of the company based in London. And I had some friends that were restructuring family conglomerates there. And ever since I came to Asia I wanted to be involved in an economy that was early enough where I could, early enough in its development where I could get a foothold with some influential families and big businesses. So my friends were restructuring the biggest, at the time was the second biggest port in the country called Myanmar Port and they grew revenue four times and it became the biggest port operator. So while I was there for this investment conference I went down to the port, saw my friend who was a CFO and they had just taken on a client called Ruby Dragon which is the biggest Ruby minor in the world or it was a few years ago before the Modde de Poise mines and most NB came online. So shortly thereafter I moved to Myanmar still working with Asia Frontier Capital but I had a client which was this Ruby business and they were conglomerate and everything from cement, so wineries, hotels, street mining, gold mining, coal, etc. So I started working with them restructuring some of the hotel operations, their cement business and then got into their wineries as well. And then after a while I stopped working with them but stayed in Myanmar and was working with a few other families mainly in teaking construction. And then in 2018, may have 2018, the Founder of Asia Frontier Capital asked me if I want to go to Kazakhstan for an investor tour and I figured why not, it's another country I've not been to and it's part of the world that I like. So I went to Kazakhstan and then tacked on Kiergistan and Uzbekistan. Kazakhstan doesn't have a huge capital markets, it has a bigger one today because of the Estonia International Financial Center but back then it was Kha'zay, Kha'zay Kshank exchange based on Mati where there wasn't a lot of free float. So nothing terribly exciting that wasn't already listed in London. So then went to Kiergistan for two days, it's a small stock market but nonetheless a little interesting country. And then I came to Uzbekistan with he just begun to open after the death of the former president and I realized that Uzbekistan was probably the biggest undiscovered gem in the world at the time. There were no foreign investors in Uzbekistan, at least in a big way actively. You had companies on the stock exchange growing literally 5, 600% year over year even though the back then the currency had depreciated 20% during the year as they floated it but nonetheless you had companies that were growing several hundred percent per year growing book value 40, 50, 60% year over year and a handful of companies back then were paying dividends which yielded in some cases up to 50%. So I realized this was potentially a golden opportunity being that Uzbekistan has the biggest population of all the Central Asian countries and if the country opens correctly and continues reforms it shouldn't do course be the biggest and most influential Central Asian states. So we ended up beginning to invest in the Uzbek capital markets and then formally launched a Uzbekistan fund in March of 2019 where I'm the Chief Investment Officer and I've been living in Taj Kent since January 2020 full time. Fascinating. In terms of the development in the last four years since you saw what clearly were remarkable bargains but also just great assets as well on the public markets how things evolved since then? The country's completely changed in most ways. There's construction everywhere you have international brands coming in. You only have two or three moles in the country now you've got half dozen in Taj Kent. You have other ones being built in second tier cities. You have express ways being built. The country's completely transforming. Universities being built everywhere reform of the education sector so you're seeing a bunch of schools being built all the way from the kindergartens up to universities. Again, it's night and day and unfortunately one way that you can monitor a bit of economic progress is through consumption and with rising consumption you've seen not only real estate bloom but traffic has gotten very bad. Of course anyone that comes here from say Southeast Asia would say that they're still no traffic compared to what it was three or four years ago it feels like Manila. In terms of the local sentiment on that narrative would you say there's a feeling of market optimism in contrast to other regions? You mentioned Manila as an example. Would you say this is an outline at right now? Outlier in contrast to other regions right now in terms of that feeling of kind of dynamism? Yeah, I mean it was back us in the problem with these countries is that when you're going from when you're transitioning from a closed economy to a more open one the bureaucracy is still there. They've digitized a whole lot of processes, made it much easier to do business but they still have much further to go. The government is very good at announcing programs and then sort of going silent on them. There are definitely pluses and minuses but there's huge opportunity in the country. It has all the right ingredients for growth and yeah there's definitely optimism on the ground. In terms of the industry breakdown in the country what would you say the most important industries are? Could you share some kind of characteristics of these industries? Sure. We'll barren on the biggest industry is that of commodities. Uzbekistan has what will be the third largest open pit gold line in the world and they have an underground extension which SRK mining the global mining services firm. It is done step out drilling so they probably have a hundred years light span at that mine. So copper gold, poor free about 70 kilometers outside of Tush Kent and then you have a company four hours from Tush Kent's coal on the train coal in Gemka. It's an avalee mining company and they're home to the second biggest producing gold mine in the world open pit after grass birth as of last year producing I think about four or five million ounces just out of this one mine. So Uzbekistan is a commodity country. It's not a hydrocarbon country but it has a huge endowment of everything else. Uranium, bit of tungsten, iron ore but certainly gold, silver, copper. So that along with the petrochemical industry probably makes up roughly 40-50% of GDP. How do you think that composition changes in the next 20 years? I'm not necessarily asking you to assume that the glass bowl is going to be correct but hypothetically speaking what do you think? Ask some kind of like either A new areas of commodities they can kind of lean into and unlock assets on or B that'll kind of just be transformative by the growth or kind of volatility in industries. I think it's services and agriculture and a bit of manufacturing that helped to down down the pure commodity exposure. Uzbekistan is the horticultural bread basket of the entire region where for example Kazakhstan is the cash crop producer of the region. So Kazakhstan produces the grains. Uzbekistan produces everything else. For manufacturing you have the biggest labor force here and logistically Uzbekistan is slowly but surely integrating from a multimodal perspective to become the logistical heartland of central Asia. So that should help cut down on logistics costs of moving goods both to Europe but also to China. And then services and IT in general, tourism, there's a handful of IT parks here basically in every major city which are attracting and incentivizing local entrepreneurs to build businesses here which is keeping talent here but you also of course have a lot of Russian, Belarusian Ukrainian companies that have relocated to central Asia in the past year and a half and Uzbekistan's capturing a bit of that. So if you look at the increasing amount of IT if you will coming out of Astana through their sort of IT park up there, you should potentially have something very similar in Kazakhstan. Sorry, in Uzbekistan. Interesting. In terms of, you mentioned Kazakhstan being more predominant in oil production, do you think the natural geology of Uzbekistan suggests a similar kind of set of discoveries or is this sign that you think is unique to the Caspian Sea and not to the actual physical ground? Yeah, I mean what's funny about countries is when you look at how their borders are drawn so if you look at Uzbekistan, their western borders are literally a straight line down, clear indication that Uzbekistan was not to be given access to the Caspian. So you look at Kazakhstan and their biggest oil fields are in and around the Caspian up in the northwest. So Uzbekistan has oil and gas, it definitely needs to invest more in its gas infrastructure but it will probably always be a net importer of oil and increasingly gas. Which again is perfectly fine because if you look at who has the refining capacity in the region, it's Uzbekistan. So the way that I look at Uzbekistan is that it's never going to be competitive and let's say basic shirts and socks, that's going to be Bangladesh via non-Campodia. Uzbekistan is going to be a value added commodity producer. So they're going to take, for example, crude, they're going to refine it here into kerosene for jet fuel, they're going to refine it into various petroleum products and then they're going to sell that back into places like southern Kazakhstan. Or it's going to be used in the petrochemical industry here for, for example, like gas to produce plastic resins, fertilizers, etc. and those goods will be exported. So Uzbekistan is very much the processing center. It doesn't need to be self-sufficient at all or be well endowed in certain commodities like hydrocarbons. Interesting. And in many respects, that's arguably better for the kind of value-ad, and value-capturing of the region as well. Yes, certainly. If you look at Central Asia, if it was one country which it was 100 years ago, the region was called Turkistan. You think Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan had the water. Uzbekistan has the agricultural land along with Kyrgyzstan a bit, but Uzbekistan has the labor and a variety of resources. And then Kazakhstan has the ability to grow cash crops and it has the oil and gas. So if the whole region was one country, it would be a very well integrated country. But of course, that's not happening anytime soon. In terms of the education landscape over there, the image that comes to mind is the old USSR and Soviet technical education that's kind of premier globally in many respects. Does that legacy still exist in Uzbekistan and how do you describe the strength of the upstream education that goes into the labor force in the country? Unfortunately, it's a big step back for this country. The question here is not as good as it should be. Luckily the government understands that it's a huge issue and the potential detractor for the development of the country and they're trying to reform it. So what brought me here in 2020 is I got a job as an adjunct professor teaching a few hours a week and then of course, pandemic hit, so I stuck around not teaching anymore but it gave me some insight into some of the private and public universities here. And the universities aren't terrible. Some of them are actually quite good. The challenge is that you need to start reforming the education system as a 20-year process if you will. You need to reform it from kindergarten all the way up through primary school to university. And that doesn't happen overnight so you could have the best universities in the world. But if you haven't given your students the tools needed to say critically ask questions and the desire to learn and knowing that they actually need to study to be able to get good results, that causes huge issues. So again, the government knows it's a big problem. They're investing hundreds of millions and do course and be investing billions into it. But it takes time. So but certainly lack of capacity in this country is a result of the poor education system. In terms of hot infrastructure, one of the compliments I've seen given to Uzbekistan is its train system as a whole. In terms of the spectrum of hot infrastructure and your assessment of it, one being transportation, two, I'm interested in digital infrastructure, telecoms, data centers, etc. What's your kind of assessment of a high level of those three subsets? It's very good considering where the country is in its current stage of development. When I first came here in 2018, having previously lived in again, mainly Southeast Asia, back then Uzbekistan arguably had better infrastructure than Vietnam. It didn't have fancy bridges because it doesn't need to, like you see in the Maycon and whatnot. But in terms of rail infrastructure, the airports and then even the roads. All the major cities, the key roads are 3, 4, 5 lanes in each direction. The infrastructure here is superb based on where it is in its current stage of development. And they keep building it left and right because they need to. It's the country's growing very rapidly. But as you mentioned, the railroads are very good. There's a high speed rail in the country. They call it a bullet train, but it's really just a high speed rail. I think it peak, it goes about 230 or so kilometers an hour. But there's Spanish trains, self-financed by the government. And now they're expanding it further to the west to a city called Hiva from Buhara. And then in due course, I believe their plans are to move it into the Farragana Valley, which is where the majority of the population is. Similarly, with telecommunications infrastructure, when I first came here in 2018, in the cities it was okay. But the moment that you drove out of the city, not only did you not have 4G or LTE or Edge, you didn't have service. So if you got a flat tire, you were in trouble. You had to wait for a car to come barreling down the road to to help you out. Now, in most of the country, you have 4G. And on the trains, you have 4G as well. So they still have a ways to go to improve it. But speed wise connectivity, I'd say, with having spent some time in Europe this summer, telecommunications network is better news back then than a lot of Western Europe these days. Wow. So do you think that there's, as they kind of open up their economy, seeking external investment, as you've observed on the ground and through analysis, if you were to describe three high-level areas for investment, again, your specialty area now is public markets, but more in the sense of folks who may want to do joint ventures or who want to invest on the private side of things, using a combined analysis of economic opportunity, but also how far behind they may be in certain areas, or the need to upgrade a certain sector. What are two or three sectors that you think, or sub-sectors that investors may want to look at with God's shoes backstond? I might give you a few more than three, but I'll try to keep it limited. So certainly, electric infrastructure, energy is huge. And they need base load, not intermittent solar wind. They need nuclear, they need gas, they need coal, ideally nuclear. So energy, road infrastructure, then education, healthcare, and I think one of the biggest opportunities, but certainly a challenge having explored it in Southeast Asia myself, would be agro-industrial infrastructure, cold storage logistics, general food processing, being able to do packaging, irradiation facilities, to be able to increase the quality of product, increase lifespan, because a lot of stuff is picked when it's ripe, then it's taken to the bazaar, and its lifespan is two or three days just because it was picked fresh. So the ability to streamline that, make it more efficient, and increase exports of quality product that can enter more markets would be a huge benefit of this country. What's the structure right now of the agricultural sector in Uzbekistan? In what regard? Is it predominantly fragmented amongst small-hulled farmers? Are there a couple of big cap players that are integrating? There's a lot of international involvement in terms of the nestlies of the world, or the Louis Dreyfaces of the world, etc. What does it look like? What does the landscape look like on that front? The majority of agriculture in Uzbekistan is smaller, and then you have a handful of local groups, whether they've been banks, textile companies, industrial companies which have been taken, food and beverage companies that have been taken, excess cash flows, and invested into orchards or what not, apples, grapes, peaches, etc. And there what you would call the more large scale monoculture, but still large scale monoculture here is maybe 40-50 hectares. You don't have huge, huge monoculture here. So the vast majority of the agricultural industry here is very much smaller. What do you think it takes to succeed in agribusiness? It's just like I'm just generally curious about, because as I look at, say, conversations of how to folks who invest in Africa, one of the big topics is despite the fact that you have, say, 70% of a population in a country like Zambia or whatever, working on agriculture, there's still one important food from outside to, you know, as a result, not self-sufficient, but three, there's just shocking inefficiency in the system. In contrast, you may have a place like Netherlands where there's like incredibly efficient at production of food. What do you think enables the creation of these companies that can be these aggregators of these types of things, like the O-Lams or the world, etc.? If we're just kind of pontificating here. Well, when I look at his back of sound, I guess anywhere really, it comes down to having someone who knows what they're doing, picking in good land with good soil, knowing what can grow, what can't grow. But then also, quoting a friend who is an agronomist and investor in agriculture here, I saw him yesterday and we were talking about executive this and he said, you know, the most important thing that in agriculture, really at the end of the day is luck because you can have an invasive species, you can have an environment, a virus come and destroy your farm, you can have droughts, you can have a whole variety of things that can cause problems for you that you can't control. This is the curse of agriculture, is that it's one of the most important industries in the world, but your hostage to so many variables that you have no control over. Very interesting. So I'm guessing for the more risk of us investor, agriculture is probably not the sector to look at in Uzbekistan. Well, something that I always found interesting, having looked at the mango harvest in Cambodia, is that when you go to the bazaar here, right now for example, you can buy a 6, 7 kilo watermelon for a dollar 50. It's free. So the problem is that there's such a lack of cold storage logistics that when small holders harvest, they all typically harvest at the same time and everyone brings their product to market which collapses prices. By kilo strawberries a peak season or dollar effectively free. So the ability to go and acquire large amounts of product at peak season, and then at the very least have the cold storage ability to hold onto product. For even if it's a few weeks, you can capture a great margin that is the season fades, and then you can unload your product onto the market, or you can buy huge quantities of various harvest at peak harvest and freeze it, process it, export it. So that's a huge opportunity. But again, a lot of people in the ag space don't have the working capital or the warehousing to be able to do it. So there's just definitely more risk versus way risk of us ways to play the ag market than just pure farming. I was quite a fan of coming across a few cold chain rolloops in Latin America that launched in the last couple of years. I find it interesting because obviously if you look at say that being a core form of infrastructure for the area business in general, an underrated path I think is the private funding of infrastructure in most of these markets. One example, historically as if you look at say Argentina, most of those railroads were funded with British joint stock venture money, finding these avenues for private investors to get involved in these areas that could have tremendous kind of growth characteristics is very exciting. One more thing I'd like to ask on this topic is if one looks at say a place like Malaysia, where I remember reading the statistic where I think between 12 to 16 of the 30 billionaires in Malaysia came from the palm oil industry. This is interesting because I typically didn't think of oh, aggregate business as the producer of these generational entrepreneurs and generational wealth, etc. What do you think is different about that versus say traditional agricultural entrepreneurship which may not produce as many of these types of magnets? What's going on there? Malaysia, for example. Let's use the clock family. The clock family got the monopoly for if I'm not mistaken importing wheat and they had all the flour mills in the country. So when you have a monopoly, you can do such things and I imagine a lot of land acquired for palm oil plantations was acquired very cheap. And as we both know palm oil is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, edible oil to produce. So it's a good business to throw it there and in Indonesia. In Uzbekistan, it's not a cash crop country. It's a high value crop country against barriers. It's peach's nectarines, apps. So a bit of nuts, it's things that you don't need to have 50,000 hectares worth to be able to make a lot of money. You can have a much smaller footprint and still do quite well. But a lot of it is probably lack of capital. And again, the benefit of the palm oil industry is that they undercut the majority of edible oils, especially sunflower, apes, seed, etc. Well, you can be growing peaches here. Firstly, it's perishable unlike something like a palm oil, which is perishable but has a much longer shelf life. But with products that are grown in hard to sit in Uzbekistan, they have a much shorter shelf life. And then you're competing against the clock due to logistics, which can be quite expensive. For example, you look at Iran. Iran is a huge horticultural production sensor, which is supplying the broader region. They can do it cheaper than Uzbekistan. The quality is not as great, but again, price and access to market is key. So I think that's one very big differentiating factor between being big and agribusiness. And for example, Uzbekistan versus Malaysia. I appreciate you sharing that. That's actually helped steep in my model of analyzing those types of opportunities. Zooming out of it, one of the big narratives with regards to Uzbekistan opening up is the privatization pipeline. Could you share some high level thoughts on the development of that and how folks can think about this? Yeah, the government has about 30 companies later for privatization mainly through the stock market. The problem is that again, this country is going from having been exceptionally closed and controlled by the state to being more free market and open over the past five years or so. And change doesn't happen overnight as we know. And the problem is that in frontier markets where you've got development banks and consultants helping push you along. Nonetheless, things don't happen overnight. They take time. So the plan is to privatize sort of what I call the crown jewels of the economy. Some banks and friends companies, some real estate companies, some mining, steel, etc. And it seems that in due course they probably will. There have been a few false starts. But probably the big thing holding back the privatization program is the question of who's going to buy the privatizations. We're investing in Uzbekistan, but we were early and we went through the pain of opening up brokerage accounts, which required aposteeals, translation of documents into Russian, etc. Very bureaucratic. There's a comprehensive piece of capital markets legislation which is sitting at parliament right now. It just been a translation of it. And then it'll go for comment. It'll be moving around through ministry of justice and whatnot. But it'll probably take a little while further to be passed. And this encompasses everything from securitization of assets to creating mutual funds, etc. etc. And that piece of legislation is also going to enable the Tajkan stock exchange to integrate with Euroclear and Clear Stream, which means that foreign investors won't necessarily have to open up local brokerage accounts. But further, the legislation will eliminate the need for translation of documents into Russian, aposteeals, etc. There'll be a digital account opening process. So the big question in the capital markets here is you've got huge value enlisted companies, but how do you increase liquidity? You increase liquidity one way through marketing, better management of these SOEs, even before you privatize them, but also making the rails to access the market easier and more seamless. And for example, the CEO of the Tajkan stock exchange is a gentleman named George Parsachvili, who's the former CEO of the Georgian stock exchange in Tablici. He's done this before. But it's a matter of getting everyone involved on the same page and moving forward, which again, it's bureaucracy, the country with a whole lot of bureaucracy. Nonetheless, is these pieces begin to fall into place? I think you'll have a rather sizable privatization program. Maybe some of these companies ultimately don't get privatized, but there's enough of them that will be partially privatized to say, for example, transform the domestic capital markets. And I think in due course that actually kickstarts an IPO wave of private companies, something similar to what was experienced in Mongolia five or six years ago. So the privatization program here is always around in terms of progress. I think they have a few other things in my opinion, which need to be executed on before they can actually really consider a large scale privatization program. Interesting. I'm glad you mentioned Mongolia actually, because you mentioned spending time working and exploring that market. A while back, we had a fellow on the podcast talking about this Jamal, who worked on mining in Mongolia, also a strong, strong natural resource market. And from my understanding, there was a lot of hot money that entered during a cycle and left afterwards. Could you share a bit of a history of Mongolia's, but what you kind of observed in Mongolia, for people to kind of assimilate that case study in their mother? Sure. Well, as we've talked about offline, what's fun about frontier markets is you realize that the entire social construct that we believe that exists in the West and exists everywhere actually is a figment of our imagination. Mongolia is a perfect example, sort of from a governance angle. So Robert Friedland, I believe in 1998, bought the OYOTOGOI expiration license from if I'm not mistaken, BHP or BHP had dropped it and he got it from the government. Anyways, they had their discovery. And I think they signed the investment agreements with the government, the first one in 2008 or 2009. And naturally, the 2000s was the decade of China, so commodity prices were booming. Mongolia was booming by 2012. After the GFC, Mongolia was the fastest growing economy in the world. So my business partners were organized in conference there. I'd been fascinated by it for a while because we had a mutual friend who set up a company to invest in real estate there listed the company on the Toronto Venture Exchange or Canadian National Exchange. So I arrived in June of 2012. And in my first week, I met three people who said they were going to invest between 10 and $50 million into city center real estate. Now for those who have been to Ulaanbaatar, especially back then, the countries, the cities completely transformed. Back then, if I'm not mistaken, the population of Ulaanbaatar was about 1.3 million and 700,000 roughly lived in what are called the gear districts. The gear is a Yorke, it's the Mongolian word. They're effectively dislobed. So you have four or five hundred thousand people living in city center proper in real housing. Well, if you were to invest 10 to 50 million dollars into city center real estate, you would retire a good portion of the Mongolian population because property prices would have gone up of several hundred percent. Naturally, this is when Mongolia was super hot. These people looked around. I imagine they had a lot of fun. A week later, they laughed and they probably have never been back. Then in August of 2012, I remember I was sitting at a cafe with a friend and we were talking about the economy. In May of that year, there's a company called South Goby Sands that I think the Chinese group was looking to acquire. The government passed the law stating that they could deem any asset in Mongolia, any mining asset, is strategic. Therefore, take a mandatory, I think, 34% stake. They effectively blocked this takeover and foreign investment had already started dying off by the time I got there. But we're sitting at this cafe and we're talking about the economy and it was like overnight, someone had literally just turned off the light switch. Cranes stopped turning. Construction sites were empty. The currency blew out and they went into an economic crisis. Of course, this is right as the commodity markets were peaking around 2012. The economy didn't really recover until, if I'm not mistaken, there was an IMF bailout in 2018-2019. I was going back and forth between Mongolia and Southeast Asia until the middle of 2016. It was fascinating because when you thought that the economy couldn't get any worse and the government was going to fix it, they implemented some phenomenally stupid policy that made it worse. Then when it got worse and the currency blew out again, I think the currency back when I was there was 1,328 at the low. Now, if I'm not mistaken, it's 4,000 something. When you thought it couldn't get any worse, they did something else and they did it again. That was when I had my money, it picked me up and realized that because everyone talks about catching the bottom. That's when I realized that when people say it can't get any worse, you look at Venezuela, you look at it's in Bobway, you can always get worse. Once they had an IMF bailout, things started to turn around and then of course COVID and whatnot happened and then you had the commodity cycle bottom and it turned. Mongolia is doing okay now, but that was my experience in Mongolia. It was truly fascinating to see how a country could run so far off the rails and continue to move in that direction. For example, and then I'll stop talking, but I forget the year I was invested in a coal company. It's a Hong Kong company next to the Hong Kong company that has a coal asset next to the Taavong Togo coal deposit. I believe it's the biggest coal deposit in the world and like 70 kilometers from the Chinese border, where the President Mongolia invited the Dalai Lama because they practiced a degree of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia and the Chinese government advised them not to invite the Dalai Lama. Of course, they invited the Dalai Lama. I think he spent a week or so there. Everyone was happy and then all of a sudden the border with China closed for I believe nine months and the economy went to a spiral. This is before the IMF bailout, which didn't help the situation because the economy was already in shambles. Then of course, Mongolia is a different country today. It's moving in the right direction or less, but it was fascinating to see sort of free markets, ideologies and motion, things that you would never think would be possible were possible. That was a big eye opener for me that anything was possible. Very much the embodiment of Murphy's Law, which I'm sure will calm and soothe investors in these areas. Next question here is what South East Asian or just general Asian country do you think is most underrated and which is most overrated by investors right now, given your kind of exposure and experience in most of these places? Unfortunately, can I say Iran? Yes, well that's an answer for a very small segment, small segment of people who are able to who are not kind of caught by US and UK sanctions. I think one of the most underappreciated misunderstood countries in the world today. Let's say South Southeast Asia. I guess perhaps Vietnam, but it's also flavor of the month if you will. It's certainly built on globalization and export economy, and they're going through a real estate crisis right now, which is fine. They need to because probably market was very overheated, but there's still a whole host of value in that country. And Southeast Asia, it's going to muddle long, I think, is you see sort of de-globalization of the world and regionalization and spokenization. And the fact that Southeast Asia doesn't have a whole lot of its own resources. It's very much a processing re-export region. But if there's one country down there that's going to probably do quite all right, and again, there's some serious value in the stock market these days in Vietnam. That's a country I would keep an eye on. It's completely transformed since I last lived there. Interesting. I think I remember looking at, I think it was two and a half months ago, Asia Frontier funds, quarterly updates. And they were showing the returns for Vietnam and Iraq as being far outside to the other countries at the time. I think Iraq was up like 47% year and Vietnam. I don't know if it was recovering from really what was a bottom in the stock market. And so therefore also had a significant growth delta. But that's interesting to hear. One more question here is, how do the business session investing cultures differ across these different countries that you've spent time operating with them? There are similarities and differences. I guess perhaps how blunt you are in some countries, you are more forward in some countries, you are more reserved than you, you take things slower. Difficult to answer, but I think probably the biggest common denominator is that relationships are integral. And I know that probably sounds funny because relationships are important to anywhere. But in these markets to do serious business over a long period of time, good relationships and trust is very, very important. But likewise, to be able to establish those relationships, something I love about all the countries that have ever lived in is that if you want to go more or less and meet government official, you want to go meet a public company or private businessmen and whatnot, they're typically an email or a phone call away due to a lack of capital and that these countries are researching for investors. It tends to be relatively easy to have meetings with people that you wouldn't so easily have meetings with in Western countries. I totally resonate with that. I think so good friend of mine. He's a couple years older than me, very sharp guy and he worked at an emerging markets fund that was based in London. And he spoke about what he felt to be a lack of training and care for the new generation. It was a bit of a sweatshop, quite frankly. But the second thing that he spoke about was now he's building a startup in Kenya with a friend of his and he spoke about how within the first three months the ability to in many respects, participate with the top rungs of participants in these markets was essentially a finger click away. And that is so, so different. Especially for someone outage, you can have ossified and how held up a lot of these high-rarchies are. I think that's actually a great point and a great value prop for folks who are young, for example, when you first started out, it must have been very exciting, journey, not going to be cool to anything. But yeah, it's a platform for myself, I very much resonate with that. Here's another question. What are some investments, transactions or company stories that you think are indicative of the types of success scenarios that can happen in front of your markets? We've kind of spoken about some of the difficulties and we've spoken about some of the macro tailwinds for opportunities in Uzbekistan. What are some examples historically that kind of show people the types of, you know, whom runs, so to speak, that one could hit, if they get things right in one of these markets? I mean, you can look at all the stories of Russia and the night, buying Russia in the 90s. But I'll give you a personal example when I was in Cambodia for the first time, I guess the second time in 2013, January. I met a lawyer who became friends and he showed me around Phnom Penh a bit and I remember on the outskirts the the city was being expanded and back then you could buy rice patty on the edge of Phnom Penh, which is now very much in Phnom Penh for roughly $4 US 1st square meter. I actually'll tell you two stories, so this is the first one, $4 US 1st square meter. And that's now prime factory area going for 120 to 150 per square meter. Well, similarly, I have an old acquaintance who he was already saying, yeah, can you go back for a second? In terms of land acquisition, land title rights, etc. How was that a risk available that kind of would have come into fact to that and contrast other regions? What was that regime like in that place? I'm just wondering what the type of calculus someone who sees that at that time would have gone through in terms of, hmm, would this be an enduring investment or not if they were on the ground? To a degree, you can set a land holding company in Cambodia and structure where you can have to factor control over the land. So, but then for example, in Vietnam it's much more difficult. In Uzbekistan, it used to be much more difficult, but you know, of course then you might have to put something in someone's name, which means that it's not really an institutional level investment. But another one for you is I have an old acquaintance in Cambodia and he was an archaeologist. He went in I think 1999 to go just work on anchor what? You move there. I believe he became a citizen and he has several tens of thousands of hectares of land spread throughout the country that he bought for about a nickel per square meter. That land today is probably worth 1500 to 2000 for hectare. So, not bad. I think the biggest challenge in these markets is you see great wealth that's accumulated. They're very difficult places to do business, but I think longevity is the key. If you're willing to be on the ground, number one, not fly and fly out, build strong relationships and trust, but also be willing to be there for the medium to long term and benefit from that re-rading because again, as we've discussed offline before the price you pay anywhere in the world is key. If you can buy assets cheap and you can hold on to them and you've got the right tailwinds, especially if they're secular tailwinds, you can build generational wealth. Very exciting stuff. On that note, I was going to ask for any kind of final piece of advice or lessons or call to action. Those seem like some sub-graded advice nonetheless. Any final course to action for the audience before we end today's session. Perhaps just if one has the curiosity travel as much as you can and travel at the places you otherwise would never travel to. For example, last year I made the trip to Liberia and going to Monrovia, this was my first time ever in Africa, which if you friend said you really hit Africa hard, it was my opening as to how other parts of the world function, especially once that are very undeveloped. It was a rough trip, but it was very educational. I think travel is key. Having an open mind and being willing to look at anything. Any investment opportunities that struck you is interesting in Liberia, logging and gold mining. That's what I went there for. Awesome. Cool. Well, I look forward to discussing that further and another time. Thank you so much for making the time skydiving. It's been wonderful and deeply educational. I appreciate it very much. Thanks, Crash.