The Case for Frontier Africa — Deep Value at the Bottom of the Cycle

That's fantastic.

And it sounds like really good grounding.

So you mentioned starting from the bottom a couple of times there.

That's really interesting.

I think the key there So even in our firm today, we all monitor companies, update databases, do the hard grunt work.

And it's only really by doing that multiple times over and over, over the years, do you start...

And for me, it was gradual.

You make lots of mistakes, you learn from them, and it takes a long time to build up that experience base.

Sometimes you have to make the same mistake once or twice before you actually learn the lesson.

So we try and institutionalize the learnings of our mistakes, and we've made many of them.

We have lots of scars.

The idea is that everyone in our firm is first and foremost a researcher, or

we search for additional knowledge, understanding of these companies.

What's the core investment thesis at 337 Frontier Capital?

Yeah, I think that is the core to what we do.

We are first and foremost long-term value investors.

We don't try and tie markets.

We're not momentum people.

We don't pay that much attention to future growth.

We believe that if we can find high-quality businesses that are trading at significant discounts to intrinsic value, and whether that be a PE or a price to book, we try and make sure that we don't overpay for investors good businesses.

In Africa, we are extremely fortunate to be able to buy super high-quality businesses at extreme discounts to intrinsic value.

This is an anomaly and we can talk about why, but this is one of the reasons why I decided to pivot from investing in South Africa to investing in the frontier markets space for whatever reason, whether it be liquidity or being not on people's benchmarks or just being in obscure markets.

The discount that we buy these businesses to their intrinsic values is extraordinary.

I haven't seen anything like that.

Why the decision to go down the value route? So basically, I'm trying to probe the, I guess, the philosophy behind your decision to choose that particular strategy.