This Is What a True Free Market Looks Like
By Tom Dyson
September 19, 2008
The smell was so pungent, my stomach lurched and I immediately started sweating. I clutched my nose with my shirtsleeve and started searching for a place to throw up...
But I was six stories up... on a catwalk above a pulp mill. There was nowhere to go.
The smell was coming from a vat of chemicals to my right. A machine was heating these chemicals, bubbling them in the open air and then piping them to a floor below. A sign on the side said "Danger – Black Liquor."
I'm writing to you from India. Two days ago, I went to visit a paper manufacturing plant in the state of Tamil Nadu. First I climbed to the top of the pulp mill. Here, they mix woodchips with powerful chemicals and bleaches until they turn into a thick, white liquid. This is wood pulp.
The company bought this pulp mill from a Canadian firm. They took it apart in Quebec, shipped it over, and rebuilt it in the jungle of South India.
Later, I wandered through the papermaking plant, where they turn the pulp into paper. This plant makes office paper... the sort you'd use in a copy machine. Dozens of industrial rollers – rotating 50 times a second – stretched the pulp into sheets and wrapped them onto 10-foot spindles.
This plant produces 125,000 tons of paper each year... and about $11 million a year in profits.
To build this plant from scratch, you'd have to spend at least $225 million. But right now, you can buy this company on the Indian stock market for just $35 million.
The story gets even better. This plant is expanding its capacity. In two years, it'll produce 225,000 tons of paper per year, almost twice as much. The expansion could not come at a better time. The Indian paper industry is short of capacity, and paper prices are soaring.
An Indian hedge fund – Atyant Capital – asked the DailyWealth team to come visit. They wanted to show me, Steve Sjuggerud, and editor in chief Brian Hunt what fantastic investments you can find in India if you look beyond the high-profile stocks that trade on international exchanges.
Here's another example: Yesterday, Atyant introduced us to an Indian power-generating company. India has chronic power shortages. This company owns a power plant that's worth $150 million. Yet the company trades in the stock market with a market cap of $21 million. "They could sell this asset for $150 million tomorrow if they wanted," says Rahul, the fund manager. "There are bidders. It's a liquid asset."
Last week, I was in Shanghai, China. Shanghai is a glorious city of glass skyscrapers, modern roads, and expensive train stations. The government planned it. So a lot of this infrastructure will turn out to be wasted money. Take the Maglev train in Shanghai...
The Maglev train travels at 270 miles per hour. It takes you from the city center to Shanghai Pudong Airport in seven minutes. The Maglev cost $50 billion. But no one uses it. It's cheaper to take a bus... and more convenient to take a taxi. There were only 20 passengers on my train.
India is the opposite of Shanghai. It's in shambles... It's dirty and noisy. People sleep in the streets. We're in the country's fourth-largest city, and there are no skyscrapers. It takes an hour to drive 15 miles to the airport. You share the road with cows pulling carts. People dump their trash in the street gutters.
This is what a true free market looks like. It's chaos.
As an investor, I'm more impressed with India than I am with China. They respect property rights in India. They have honest accounting and one of the most advanced stock markets in the world. And as we've seen this week, India is loaded with wonderful stock market opportunities...
Good investing,
Tom
Editor's note: Tom Dyson is a regular contributor to DailyWealth, a free investment newsletter focused on the world's best contrarian opportunities. We write with a simple belief in mind: You don't have to take big risks to make big money with your investments.
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