meek-investor

Yesterday was Martyr’s Day in India – the day when perhaps its most illustrious martyr, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated more than 60 years ago. It’s a day largely unnoticed by the Indian public . We have many “days” these days – Children’s day, Teacher’s day, Father’s day, Mother’s day, and so on. Many are the product of a commercial opportunity exploited. In the clutter, the not so commercialised days fall by the wayside. I suggest that Martyr’s Day deserves rather more a consideration. The supreme sacrifice for a country is the biggest call a nation can ever make to its citizens. The call comes to the military and, these days, unfortunately to political leaders. It is a supreme irony that Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace, fell victim to an assassin’s bullet. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi followed as martyrs – assassinated because of something they did in office. This post is however more on the military side of martyrdom. Every military man knows when he joins the military that...

Much of the press on the calamitous state of the US auto industry centered around General Motors. Spare a thought for Ford, which has quietly done some amazing things. Ford was the only one among the Big Three that did not take the US government bailout. They also were the only one that did not go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And yesterday, they announced pretty good 2009 results. They made a profit of $ 2.7 billion in 2009. Yes, t-h-e-y m-a-d-e a p-r-o-f-i-t- i-n 2-0-0-9 ; one of the most brutal years for the auto industry. They gained market share in the US. Their fourth quarter volumes were up 26%. By any standards, an impressive performance. Sure the numbers hide some real worries (as they always do). Their main business of selling cars actually lost $1.4 bn in 2009. That loss was offset by their finance arm – Ford Motor Credit which made a profit of $1.9 bn. (just goes to show that taking a loan to buy a car is for suckers). But in Ford’s favour, in the fourth quarter, the car bus...

If you’ve been within 100 miles of any business school, you have , no doubt, memorised from cover to cover, all the pages of Marketing Management by Philip Kotler. A doyen of marketing, Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management . His work was the standard text book 30 years ago, and still is. Many marketing hotshots are educated on his concepts and then blithely spend a lifetime ignoring it. Make a shoddy product, charge the moon for it, pour a fortune down the drain in advertising and then wonder why the product isn’t selling ! The zillions of dollars sloshing around the advertising industry is testament to this “Marketing Myopia”, to borrow a phrase from another seminal piece by Ted Levitt from a few decades ago. One shining exception to this is Apple. They anticipate (and sometimes even create) consumer needs and meet it brilliantly. To hell with all the rest. Take the case of the iPhone. Absolutely br...

Its difficult to get all senti with concrete. But then office buildings are no ordinary slabs of concrete. They are a piece of history in themselves. They have seen numerous people come and go, they have seen victories and defeats, they have seen joyful moments and sad occasions. They deserve a farewell when its their own time to go. Today a corporate giant moves away from a legendary building, which has been its home for 46 years, to a new home. For most people its just another office move. Perhaps they are perturbed by the longer (or shorter) commute for them. Perhaps they are more concerned with the parking. Some are, no doubt, measuring whether the size of their room (or cubicle) is as big as what they had in the previous place. This writer is not part of this move. But that hasn’t stopped him from waxing nostalgic – my good friend Ravi accused me of being a die hard romantic in his comment in my previous post. I’m still tickled pink by that sobriquet, and hence continuing in that ...

Goodbye Zhang ; as the title says , this is a farewell post for Zhang Dan, my wonderful Chinese teacher. This week, I had my last class with Zhang, a moment tinged with some sadness. For she leaves next week to study in the UK. She hadn’t expected this to happen, but an opportunity came and it all worked out. So off she goes. Some months ago, I had gathered courage to attempt to learn Chinese. I was met by a young, earnest girl, who was to be my teacher. She was a post graduate student at the university and this was her first attempt to teach Chinese to a waiguoren (foreigner). Now the Chinese word for teacher is laoshi; the prefix lao stands for old age. It is assumed that the teacher will be an elderly person and the student somebody much younger. But here the tables were turned- she is a young girl and I am (ahem) just a tad older ! But what a teacher she proved to be. I’ve rarely seen anyone who’s so obviously born to the profession. She loves teaching she says and it showed every ...

It had to come. The backlash against the banks was long overdue after the mayhem of the financial crisis of last year. It took the Massachusetts election result, where Ted Kennedy’s seat was won by a Republican (yes the liberal bastion of the US actually voted Republican) to trigger it. This blogger is a staunch and unabashed votary of free trade, capitalism and the efficiency of markets. This post, which might seem to back a populist move is actually championing the cause of capitalism, although it might appear at first sight to be arguing against it. The fundamental problem of the financial crisis was the too big to fail theory. The institutions in trouble were too big to be allowed to go bust. Therefore, however crazy their actions were, they had to be bailed out , primarily by the US government, for the consequences of not doing so would have been worse. This must not be allowed to be repeated. Nobody should be allowed to become so big that irrespective of whatever they do, they ca...

Its difficult to reconcile to the way the Kraft Cadbury deal finally ended (the deal got done today). Not the outcome – M&A transactions like this happen all the time. But the way it happened makes me reflect if unbridled capitalism is really a good thing. My ire is on the hedge funds – they are no different to a herd of vultures which circle over an animal that’s about to die. When there’s a whiff of a M&A transaction, the hedge funds pile in to buy the shares of the target, hoping to make a killing . This is what happened in the Alcon transaction about which I posted here . Somebody tell me how what happened in the Cadbury case is reasonable by any yardstick. Here’s what happened. When the first whiff of a possible takeover of Cadbury was in the air, the hedge funds bought heavily into Cadbury shares. They then drummed up noise that Kraft’s bid was inadequate and it had to raise the price. They kept making this noise and were prepared to play brinksmanship. Till virtually yes...