Thursday, February 7, 2013

A spark lighting fires in shipping, transportation, etc.?

It feels so good when one feels vindicated...

Wherever capital flows (for direct investment or otherwise), there are so-called 'leading steers'. Market participants observe the behavior of leading steers and, generally, follow them.

The hardest part in attracting foreign investment is to get the first few investors of high repute; i. e. leading steers. Once that is accomplished, things tend to become a lot more easy. Are we seeing something like that developing in Greece?

The Cosco-investment in Piraeus has been my favorite example ever since I heard of it. It its wake, we have now seen names like HP, Unilever, Henkel and Johnson & Johnson. The Ekathimerini now reports the following:

More major international companies that have their products manufactured in Asia are being drawn to Piraeus as a transit hub for Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean following the deal between Hewlett-Packard, Cosco and TRAINOSE.

Sources say IKEA and Dell are among the firms that have expressed an interest to examine a possible deal similar to that of HP. Interest in a possible cooperation to the same end has also been expressed by LG, Samsung, Lenovo, Sony and Hyundai, but they intend to wait and see how the HP deal progresses.

Thus, it could well be that Cosco becomes the spark which lights a large fire in everything which is related to shipping, transportation, etc. with the according collateral benefits. All Greece needs is a few more Cosco-sparks which light fires in other branches of its economy. If Greece is lucky, they will come on their own.

The much better strategy would be to aggressively go after them!

PS: I just saw this piece about Philip Morris's plans to purchase 50% of Greece's tobacco production over the next 3 years. Could tobacco perhaps be another branch which literally needs a lighter?

1 comment:

  1. 120 acres of public land on Corfu has been leased for 99 years for €23M - Greece Sells Corfu Land for Development

    €1,900 per acre per year - Hmmmm. I hope they have some sort of use it or lose it provisions. The contract on these sort of deals should be in the public domain, but they never are - anywhere. The excuse is that they have so called commercial in confidence clauses - c r a p! It's Joe Public's property so Joe should have the right to know whose doing what to his property, whom they're doing it with and whose trousering his money.

    Joe Public's London townhouse is also for sale for €23M. Maybe it will be snapped up by a Greek shipping magnate who could gift it back to Joe in lieu of taxes not paid, and Joe could sell it again - mind that dead donkey :lol:

    CK

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