Q&A Session: Value Investing in Asia

Amit Wadhwaney presented his in-depth investment thesis on Q&A Session: Value Investing in Asia at Asian Investing Summit 2015.

The following are selected Amit Wadhwaney quotations from the full transcript.

• “Asia is not one big ball of wax. It’s a very heterogeneous collection of countries and markets.”
• “Japan is making its own tottering attempts at a comeback and deep down I am mildly optimistic. I think some degree of shock therapy has been administered.”
• “India’s got a lot of promise, a lot of traction. Lots of people got interested in it. For the first time in a number of years, actually decades, there seems to be hope for a change. The problem here is the following: how much change and how quickly.”
• “…in each market there’s a distribution of companies of how they run their businesses in terms of governance, behavior.”
• Two ideas: “One is Guoco Group (Hong Kong: 53) and the other is Strait’s Trading (Singapore: STRTR). One is subject to Hong Kong rules; the other is subject to Singapore rules, which are not hugely dissimilar… Both companies are controlled by families.”

About the instructor:

Amit Wadhwaney has managed foreign stock portfolios since 1996. He has been particularly interested in emerging economies where he has long believed that market inefficiencies favor bottom-up value investors. Amit was the founding manager of the Third Avenue International Value Fund, an open end mutual fund, as well as the Third Avenue Global Value Fund and the Third Avenue Emerging Markets Fund. Amit also managed the Third Avenue International Value Fund UCITS for overseas investors as well as institutional separate accounts. Earlier in his career, Amit was a securities analyst, and subsequently Director of Research, for M.J. Whitman, Third Avenue’s affiliated broker-dealer. Amit was also a paper and forest products analyst at Bunting Warburg, a Canadian brokerage firm. He began his career at Domtar, a Canadian forest products company. He holds an M.B.A. in Finance from the University of Chicago, a B.A. with honors and an M.A. in Economics from Concordia University in Montreal (where he also taught economics) and B.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Mathematics from the University of Minnesota. He speaks French, Spanish, Hindi, Sindhi, Gujarati and English.