WASHINGTON, D.C. – Five years ago, Roger Ballentine opened a lobbying and consulting shop, Green Strategies, to counsel companies on setting environmental agendas and dealing with eco-policy in Washington. At the time, he says, that corner of business was relatively quiet.
Things have picked up. “It’s just absolutely booming,” says Ballentine.
Posted by Gillies on November 29, 2006
http://gilli.es/2006/11/29/memo-to-enviros-go-easy/
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Bad news for investors, at least for certain ones: The dollar will collapse against Asian currencies over the next two decades. Good news: China and India will evolve from devourers of basic materials into full-blown consumer economies, creating demand for U.S. exporters.
These are two of the premises behind stock picks from Stephen Fan, a money manager in Mountain View, Calif. with a fondness for midcap technology stocks. One in his portfolio is MEMC Electronic Materials, a St. Peters, Mo. firm (once part of Monsanto) that makes silicon wafers for the semiconductor industry. Last year sales outside the U.S. accounted for two-thirds of MEMC’s $1.1 billion in revenues, with the bulk going to customers in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. If Asia rockets as Fan expects, MEMC will likely go along for the ride. With shares at $35, MEMC goes for 5 times expected 2006 sales and 18 times expected earnings.
Posted by Gillies on November 27, 2006
http://gilli.es/2006/11/27/play-the-asian-boom/
WASHINGTON, D.C. – There’s no shortage of scary stats on the world’s energy needs, particularly for poorer folk. Some 1.6 billion people have no access at all to modern energy services, and 2.5 billion still rely on burning wood and the like for cooking and heating. Developing countries, reckons the International Energy Agency, will need $10 trillion worth of energy investment from here to 2030.
For those worried about global warming, the nightmare is that those trillions will get spent on low efficiency, high pollution technology.
“The investment that takes place in the next ten to 20 years could lock in very high greenhouse gas emissions for the next half-century,” notes the British government’s recently released Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, “or move the world onto a more sustainable path.”
Pushing for the latter scenario is the International Finance Corporation, the private sector development arm of the World Bank Group. One the IFC’s prime targets at the moment: commercial banks, particularly those in developing economies such as China, India and Central Europe.
Posted by Gillies on November 16, 2006
http://gilli.es/2006/11/16/pushing-bankers-on-climate-change/
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Five years ago, we presented Forbes magazine readers with a bullish call on student lender SLM, otherwise known as Sallie Mae. Backing up our bet was analyst Matthew Snowling of Friedman Billings Ramsey, an Arlington, Va., investment bank.
That tip worked out well, as Sallie has had an 84% cumulative total return since October 2001, versus 34% for the S&P 500. After last week’s election, we checked in again with Snowling on Sallie Mae , a stock that gets bounced around on political news.
“We recently dusted off the Sallie Mae story,” he says. “It’s getting interesting.”
Posted by Gillies on November 15, 2006
http://gilli.es/2006/11/15/thanks-to-the-democrats-sallie-looks-cheap/
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The engineering and construction business counts several of its giants on our list of America’s largest privately held companies. Ninth-ranked Bechtel is the most prominent among them, both in revenue size and notoriety. Leaving aside its role in Boston’s Big Dig trouble, Bechtel recently made headlines for its exit from Iraq, for which it won billions in reconstruction contracts and where it suffered dozens of employees killed.
But while Bechtel gets the spotlight and the biggest sales volume, competitor Aecom Technology is the standout for sales growth. Ranked 82nd on our list for its $3.3. billion in annual sales (for its fiscal year just ended in September), the Los Angeles engineering firm has increased its revenue at an 16% annualized clip over the past five years, more than double the rate of Bechtel’s top-line growth for that time period. The table below shows how Aecom outruns the competition on our private companies list and elsewhere.
Posted by Gillies on November 10, 2006
http://gilli.es/2006/11/10/building-momentum-aecom-technology/
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