Sorry about the long hiatus between posts but I took family time off to go to California. I am three weeks away from a new semester starting but I am on my way to Peru and Brazil over the next few days to talk about valuation. I have never been to Peru before and am looking forward to seeing Lima for the first time. I have been to Brazil once or twice each year since 1998 and I am looking forward to this trip just as much.
While I will never know as much about Brazil as I would like to, I have had the opportunity to watch the market change over the last decade. While each emerging market is different, I think that some of the changes I have observed in Brazil are common across emerging markets, as they mature:
1. From Macro to Micro: When I did my first valuation seminar in Brazil for the first time in 1998, almost every question that I got during the seminar related to macro variables, with little or no attention paid to individual companies. If fact, we spent more time discussing inflation than we did discount rates, cash flows or terminal value. Coming off the hyperinflation of the previous decade, this focus was understandable and reflected the belief that if you were right about the macro variables, company-specific information mattered little. In recent years, attention has shifted more towards company characteristics, including managerial competence and the quality of investing and financing choices , a healthy development, in my view
2. Foreign to Local Currency: In the late 1990s, spilling over into the first half of the decade, almost every valuation I saw of a Brazilian company and much of the capital budgeting was done in US dollars. Not only was there a profound distrust of the local currency (Brazilian Reais) among analysts, but the Brazilian government and large Brazilian corporations seemed to share that distrust by issuing long term debt only in US dollars. Estimating a risk free rate in Brazilian Reais was an impossible exercise. It is only in the last few years that the resistance has broken down, with the Brazilian government issuing long term Reai bonds and valuations in local currencies.
3. Foreign to Domestic Investors: When I did my first few sessions in Brazil, appealing to foreign investors (especially US institutional investors) seemed to be the key priority for corporate treasurers and Brazilian investment banks. One measure of maturity has been the increasing focus on domestic investors in recent years, with foreign investors being viewed as icing on the cake.
Like any emerging market, there have been political and economic shocks along the way, but the sessions that I do in Brazil in a couple of days will resemble closely the sessions I do in New York or Frankfurt. To me, that is a healthy development. The value of an asset is a function of its cash flows, growth and risk and that lesson should not vary across markets. I will let you know how this Latin American jaunt goes...
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