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Monday 13th of November 2017 |
Morning, Africa |
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If you are tracking the NSE Do it via RICHLIVE and use Mozilla Firefox as your Browser. 0930-1500 KENYA TIME Normal Board - The Whole shebang Prompt Board Next day settlement Expert Board All you need re an Individual stock.
The Latest Daily PodCast can be found here on the Front Page of the site http://www.rich.co.ke
Macro Thoughts |
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13-NOV-2017 :: The capture of a 32-year-old wannabe king and the future price of crude oil @TheStarKenya Africa |
The Price of Crude Oil has surged in New York by 33% since clocking a 2017 Low below $44.00 a barrel in late June this Year and is at its highest level since July 2015. Brent Crude scaled a 2-1/2-year high of $64.65 on Tuesday last week and was last at $63.65. This is an explosive and exponential price move any which way you care to cut it. In an era of lashings of lashings of surplus Oil, the Crude Oil markets had priced ''Geopolitical'' risk at close to zero. Since Late June, the markets have been re-pricing ''Geopolitical'' risk and in particular events in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia [Still the largest single Supplier of Crude Oil to Global Markets] have led the re-price.
The then 30 Year old Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohamed bin Salman MBS [who is expected to ascend to the throne as early as this week] arrived on the scene and immediately launched an unwinnable war in the Yemen. President Assad [with his Russian, Iranian and Lebanese Allies] resisted the Regime Changers in Syria. IS which was a Sunni and Saudi blade has been eviscerated. Iraq, which was once firmly in the Saudi camp is now aligned with Iran completely. Qatar is lost [see the Intercept article which refers to a Plan headlined "Control the yield curve, decide the future" a Plan to construct the ''Big Short'' on Qatar - The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi should have spoken to me because I could have told them how to do it]. Saudi Arabia and its allies UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait are caught in an ever tightening Shia pincer. The Paranoia in the Palaces in Saudi Arabia is real and existential. And what is also clear is that Bibi Netanyahu, MBZ [The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi], Jared Kushner [coaching MBS until the early hours in Riyadh just moments before MBS launched his Night of the Long Knives] and a Trump carte blanche have all leveraged this existential Paranoia to effect not a State Capture but a Kingdom Capture. The Guptas were a Precursor for this particular capture.
The existential Paranoia in the head of 32 Year old wannabe King is evidenced in this comment about Iran in May this Year '' "How can I communicate with them while they prepare for the arrival of al-Mahdi al-Montazar?"
Last week after being coached into the early hours by Ivanka Trump's husband, Jared Kushner, MBS launched his Night of the Long Knives which according to the veteran Journalist Robert Fisk and I quote
''When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening of 3 November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his mobile phone and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime minister silenced'' Hours later, MBS's newly minted Anti-Corruption commission detained 11 House of Saud princes, four current ministers and dozens of former princes/cabinet secretaries – all charged with corruption. Bank accounts were frozen [We could witness a massive $1 trillion dollar disgorge right here], private jets grounded. The high-profile Princely crew is jailed at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton and the gates are now shut, the phone line is perpetually busy and you can't book a room until Feb. 1. Fisk concludes ''Put bluntly, he is clawing down all his rivals.''
In all the history Books I have read, its probably wisest to operate on one Front not two and certainly not 3. The desperate impulse to act is also up against a 4 year deadline. The Speed of decline in FX reserves produces a 48 month shelf-life.
This week-end The Baghdad Post is reporting the kingdom has mobilised its F-15 fighter jet fleet ito launch a military operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Geopolitical Risk is biting back hard. I predict the Spot Crude Oil market re-price has further to run and will lift Brent Crude over $70.00 a Barrel.
This is an unprecedented moment in the history of the Kingdom and the most perilous moment for the House of Saud that I can recall. Taking on Iran looks like will the straw that breaks the Camels back.
WB Yeats' extraordinarily prescient Poem The Second Coming is the most quoted poem on the Internet world-wide and its not difficult to see why.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity
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"Hariri was summoned to Riyadh, and he was coerced to read his resignation statement [which] was written by the Saudis," Khishan told me Africa |
The style of the wording wasn't Lebanese, says political scientist Hilal Khashan of the American University of Beirut. “Hariri was summoned to Riyadh, and he was coerced to read his resignation statement [which] was written by the Saudis,” Khishan told me. The abrupt aggressive intervention bore the fingerprints, again, of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, otherwise known as MBS.
Mohammad bin Salman is “a young man in a hurry,” says Daniel Shapiro, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel, speaking with diplomatic care. MBS is “a young prince, not very experienced, and doesn't seem to be well educated,” says Teitelbaum.
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Saudi Arabia's credit risk surges the most in almost two years Africa |
The cost of insuring Saudi Arabian debt against default through five-year credit-default swaps soared more than 20 basis points last week amid an anti-corruption purge in the kingdom. Renewed tensions with Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militant group, have compounded investor concerns about rising political risks in the region. The last time the nation’s CDS jumped as much in a single week was in January 2016 at the height of the oil-market crash.
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The Second Coming W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939 Africa |
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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TROUBLE IN THE KINGDOM The 1,002nd Arabian Night? @aminterest Law & Politics |
It was on the fourth night, very early in the great Arabic tale, that Shahrazad, in telling the story of King Yunan and his evil vizier, says as follows: “Oppression hideth in every heart; power revealeth it and weakness concealeth it.”1 It’s hard to say from Washington, DC, how oppressive it really is for a passel of princes (11 at last count) and assorted retainers (as many as 500, according to some reports) to be held under “hotel arrest” at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh, but it’s easy to suppose that Mohammed bin Salman, the 32-year-old Saudi Crown Prince—and King in all but formal title—senses that his burgeoning power gives him license for a bit of what he no doubt considers necessary oppression. It no longer hideth entirely in his heart.
We’ll see how all this ends in due course: whether MbS remains the banquet hall’s premier diner long into the future, or rather sooner than that becomes the entrée. Both outcomes are possible. What is not possible the longer his coup from above lasts is that Saudi political arrangements will be put back the way they were pretty much since the end of 1953. He has destroyed the status quo, presumably with his feeble 81-year-old father’s blessing—or maybe not. He did so possibly because he thinks the future of the Kingdom depends on it, possibly because his will to power and personal ambition far outrun his wisdom and experience, and likely because he shrouds, even to himself, the latter truth with the former conviction.
What has gone on in Saudi Arabia over the past few days—along with its related external emanations, from the shocking resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister while in Riyadh to the Houthi missile attack on Riyadh—is the most significant cluster of events to hit the region since ISIS burst onto the scene, seemingly from nowhere, to overrun Mosul in June 2014. But unlike ISIS taking Mosul, the Saudi events may well reverberate for far longer than three and a half years, and their ultimate significance could be far more profound.
Alas, the actuarial tables have turned on Abdel Aziz’s remaining sons, all of whom are either very old now or not kingly material. Everyone understood that the transition to the next generation required a particularly exquisite implementation of ijma’. Some believe that the generational transition should have happened already, and that Salman should not have become king. But evidently no agreement was forthcoming as to who should be enthroned, so Salman may well have been the only acceptable, temporary compromise. And now his son Mohammed has short-circuited the ijma’ process, having established at least temporary control over the army, the national guard, and the internal security apparatus.
Casual Western observers generally miss the significance of this because they do not understand the origins of the Saudi state and hence what kind of Islamic society it has spawned. Contrary to what the vast majority of Americans seem to think, Saudi Arabia is not a traditional Muslim country. Saudi Arabia is an attenuated neo-fundamentalist country from having been taken over, by force of arms in the early 20th century, by a “revitalization movement”—to use Anthony F.C. Wallace’s classic 1956 description of the type. The Wahhabi movement is therefore similar in some ways to the 19th-century Mahdiya movement in Sudan and the early 20th-century Sanusiya movement in Libya, also to the Almohad convulsion of the 12th century and its long-delayed doppelganger, ISIS—and, not entirely coincidentally, to the original rise of Islam in Arabia under Muhammad himself.
What happens most of the time in such circumstances is the construction of a serviceable hypocrisy that, eventually, can permeate many aspects of ordinary daily behavior. An example: If a typical pious Muslim woman from Pakistan gets on a plane in Islamabad in order to visit Paris for some reason, she will probably exit the plane wearing the same clothing she was wearing on entering the plane, for she has internalized the rules of her religious culture; when a Saudi woman flies from Riyadh or Jedda to Paris, she will likely enter the plane in standard Saudi attire but exit the plane in the latest Western fashion, for she cannot internalize an externally enforced set of obligations in service to an obviously impossible goal. So she tows the line at home where others see her in that apparently stable if stultified, hypocritized context, but outside of that context she feels little obligation to otherwise empty forms. Similarly, Saudi men will not usually violate restrictions on alcohol and non-halal food at home, but many with the means to do so think little of crossing the causeway to Bahrain to indulge in what some entrepreneurial locals there call a Saudi Special: champagne and barbecued pork ribs.
It has noted, too, that in wanting to confront Iran MbS has been talking tougher, and now has pulled away the curtain of Lebanese politics by apparently forcing Saad Hariri to resign so that everyone can see the raw truth: the diabolical betrayal of the Maronite President Michel Aoun in laying the country at the feet of Hezbollah and hence Iran. (If there is any country in the Arab world that Americans tend to misunderstand even more than they misunderstand Saudi Arabia, it’s Lebanon, but never mind that for now.) That could spark a renewed civil war in Lebanon, thus raising the price to Iran of controlling its satrapy now that the war in Syria seems to be turning Iran’s way, but it could also maul the Sunni community there in the process. That’s fairly obvious, too.
And the press has called attention to the fact that just yesterday the Houthis again lobbed a missile about 800 miles to the outskirts of Riyadh, where a Patriot missile battery apparently intercepted it, meaning that we’re closer to turning an already extant proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran into a direct one. Well, maybe.
What’s not obvious in the press, seeing as how it is not mentioned, is that neither country can mobilize a conventional expeditionary force worth so much as a skewer of shishtawook, and there is anyway no land border between them. Nor is the right analogy obvious in the press: Iran helping Yemenis to use their territory to rocket Riyadh is something a bit like Nikita Khrushchev putting missiles in Cuba, because it undermines the asymmetrical advantage of one side. In 1962 we could hit the Soviets but they could not hit us, and the Saudis can bomb Sana‘a but not the other way around . . . until now.
In any event, the air forces and navies of both countries (with the UAE probably helping the Saudis), such as they are—and Iranian militias in Iraq and Houthi allies in Yemen ankle biting, rocketing, and terrorizing Saudi cities—look to be the modalities of any fight, if there is one. That and Iranian-supported and equipped Shi‘a saboteurs in Bahrain, perhaps, trying for a head shot at a Saudi ally/client. All kinds of interesting if improbable larger scenarios can be spun, too: Pakistan supporting Saudi Arabia by attacking and seizing Iranian Baluchistan, for example.
And so it was, on the 544th night that, as Shahrazad told the story, Sindbad the Seaman felt remorse, and said, “Would heaven I had tarried in the island. It was better than this wild desert; for there I had at least fruits to eat and water to drink, and here there are neither trees nor fruits nor streams. . . . Verily, as often as I am quit of one peril, I fall into a worse danger and a more grievous.”2 Oh yes, Dinarzad, these things happen.
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"It demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and to try to play upon his insecurities'" Law & Politics |
President Donald Trump is showing he “can be played” by Vladimir Putin when he doesn’t acknowledge Russian interference in the 2016 election, a former Central Intelligence Agency director said.
“I think he’s giving Putin a pass,” John Brennan, CIA director under President Barack Obama, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It demonstrates to Mr. Putin that Donald Trump can be played by foreign leaders who are going to appeal to his ego and to try to play upon his insecurities, which is very, very worrisome from a national-security standpoint.”
James Clapper, former U.S. director of national intelligence, agreed with that assessment and said he thinks “both the Chinese and the Russians think they can play" Trump with flattery.
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Tory turmoil as 40 MPs say May must go @thesundaytimes Law & Politics |
Forty MPs have agreed to sign a letter of no confidence in Theresa May as European Union negotiators threaten to block trade talks until March unless Britain agrees to settle the Brexit divorce bill.
The embattled prime minister is facing a fight on three fronts following another week of Tory turmoil in which Priti Patel become the second cabinet minister to resign and two other cabinet ministers — Damian Green and Boris Johnson — faced pressure to quit.
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The world's top tech shares are nearing $1.7 trillion in market value this year - more than Canada's entire economy International Trade |
Between the FAANG quintet and China’s rivaling BAT companies, gains in the world’s top technology shares are nearing a whopping $1.7 trillion in market value this year.
That’s more than Canada’s entire economy, and exceeds the worth of Germany’s biggest 30 companies put together. The eight tech giants -- Facebook Inc., Amazon Inc., Apple Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google parent Alphabet Inc., as well as their Asian peers Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. -- have amassed as much money in 2017 as Pacific Investment Management Co., one of the world’s biggest fund managers, has done in about 46 years.
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Mugabe drops the crocodile 10TH NOVEMBER 2017 @Africa_Conf Africa |
The sacking of the regime's veteran enforcer Emmerson Mnangagwa from the vice presidency has started the endgame
By throwing out Emmerson Mnangagwa from the Vice Presidency and the ruling party, President Robert Mugabe is testing his grip on the security services as the regime faces another economic meltdown over the next six months. Mnangagwa and his allies are aware of Mugabe's declining ability to pay for the loyalty of the soldiers and police that keep him in power as the spectre of another bout of hyperinflation looms.
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Kenya's @ARMCement1 Is to Become Next Target in Africa Cement Wars Kenyan Economy |
ARM Cement Ltd., is the newest takeover target in the battle among the world’s biggest cement makers to expand in Africa, according to people familiar with the matter.
ARM’s owners are exploring a sale, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private. The Nairobi-based company is currently valued at about $133 million on the Nairobi stock exchange, though the sellers are seeking more than double that amount, the people said. ARM’s two biggest shareholders are CDC Group Plc, a development-finance institution owned by the U.K. government that invested last year, and the founding Paunrana family.
“We are in the process of finding an equity and a strategic buyer to inject equity into the business,” ARM Managing Director Pradeep Paunrana said by phone on Friday. “The process is on and we expect over the next few weeks to complete that process.”
Rival cement companies including LafargeHolcim Ltd., the world’s biggest, HeidelbergCement AG of Germany, Nigeria’s Dangote Cement Plc and Titan Cement Co. SA of Greece are among parties considering bids, said the people. No final decisions have been made. ARM currently produces about 2.7 million metric tons of cement in Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda, according to its website.
Spokespeople for LafargeHolcim, HeidelbergCement and Titan declined to comment. A spokesman for Dangote Cement didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. A spokesman for parent company Dangote Group said Dangote Cement wasn’t intending to bid for the company.
There are more than six potential investors, Paunrana said. The evaluation process includes gauging the level of interest in the company and deciding how to structure the deal, he said.
The European players and Dangote are competing to expand their footprint on a continent with the potential to develop infrastructure at a blistering pace in coming decades. Cement use in Africa is less than 50 kilograms (110 pounds) per person, with some countries as low as 30 kilograms, according to London-based Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Sonia Baldeira. That compares with China’s 1,737 kilograms per person and Europe’s 230 kilograms.
ARM isn’t the only target. LafargeHolcim is in talks with South Africa’s biggest cement maker, PPC Ltd., while HeidelbergCement, Dangote and Titan are monitoring the situation. The 125-year-old company has received a formal offer from Canadian insurer Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd., which has pledged to buy a stake on condition it agrees to merge with a local rival. PPC has supplied cement for major building projects in several African countries and has expanded with new plants in Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
LafargeHolcim in Talks With South Africa’s PPC About Offer
Major cement makers outside Africa have been in consolidation mode since the creation two years ago of LafargeHolcim from Swiss and French rivals. Last month, Dublin-based CRH Plc received approval from Ash Grove Cement Co. shareholders to buy the U.S. supplier for $3.5 billion and in September, HeidelbergCement agreed to acquire Italian assets from Cementir Holding SpA.
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@ARMCement1 share price data here Kenyan Economy |
Par Value: 5/- Closing Price: 14.30 Total Shares Issued: 959940200.00 Market Capitalization: 13,727,144,860 EPS: -5.84 PE: -2.449
A mineral extraction and processing company which manufactures lime, cement and other industrial fertilisers.
ARM Cement PLC H1 2017 results through 30th June 2017 vs. 30th June 2016 H1 Revenue 5.347487b vs. 6.670350b -19.832% H1 [Loss]/ profit before tax [1.379980b] vs. [363.905m] -279.214% H1 [Loss]/ profit after tax [1.413541b] vs. [266.782m] -429.849% [Loss]/ earnings per share [3.30] vs. [1.10] -200.000% No interim dividend Total assets 49.363670b Equity attributable to equity holders of parent company 26.381580b Cash and cash equivalents at the end of the period 113.403m vs. 100.220m +13.154%
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Return of Fired CFO Presents New Headache for Kenya Airways Kenyan Economy |
“It’s just incredible and unconscionable and is remarkably activist of the judge to impose such an egregious solution on Kenya Airways, especially at a time when a new management team has been brought in to rescue the airline,” Aly Khan Satchu, chief executive officer of Nairobi-based Rich Management, said in an emailed response to questions.
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Kenya's Nakumatt supermarket chain foiled by explosive growth Reuters Kenyan Economy |
It’s an ignominious fall - with more than 60 outlets and 1,500 suppliers, turnover at the company once equaled nearly one percent of Kenyan GDP.
Former employees, suppliers, fellow business people and private equity investors paint a picture of a firm whose management capacity did not keep up with its prodigious growth.
“It’s a tragedy that needn’t have happened,” said Andrew Dixon, who was hired in a scramble to revamp management. A former executive at Tesco and Burt’s Bees, Dixon quit as chief marketing officer last month and this week took a job with Uchumi, another struggling Kenyan chain.
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06-NOV-2017 :: "But the most important infrastructure in the c21st is the internet and yours is fast!" Kenyan Economy |
Let’s now turn to the more ‘’Go-Go’’ trajectories. H1 mobile data revenue accelerated +31% to Sh17.55 billion. The average per capita mobile data consumption accelerated +66% and this confirms Kenya Inc is surfing the new c21st information superhighway, something Ali Baba’s Jack Ma also alerted us to when he visited. He was asked about our infrastructure deficit and he replied
‘’But the most important infrastructure in the c21st is the internet and yours is fast!’’
Safaricom have invested heavily in building out this c21st information highway, it represents the democratisation of data and Safaricom has given every Kenyan an entry ticket and not any old entry ticket but a Ferrari to this new c21st of ours. Calls for the boycott of Safaricom are ‘’kindergarten’’ economics and will surely tip opposition strongholds into economic recession.
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