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How to Invest Internationally

Not every great investment calls the United States its home and some companies don’t even do business in the U.S. Many companies, however, which operate in other countries do have some form of listings on U.S. exchanges -- meaning that you can invest in them. Anirban Mahanti joins “7investing Now” from his home in Sydney, Australia to bring an international perspective on investing. He’ll share how he evaluates companies, dealing with political risk, and what red flags you should watch for when looking beyond the U.S. for great stocks.

October 22, 2021

Not every great investment calls the United States its home and some companies don’t even do business in the U.S. Many companies, however, which operate in other countries do have some form of listings on U.S. exchanges — meaning that you can invest in them. Anirban Mahanti joins “7investing Now” from his home in Sydney, Australia to bring an international perspective on investing. He’ll share how he evaluates companies, dealing with political risk, and what red flags you should watch for when looking beyond the U.S. for great stocks.

Transcript

Sam Bailey  0:11  Welcome to 7Investing Now, a show that teaches you how to take a long term view on investing by better understanding what’s happening in the market now.

Dan Kline  0:21  Good afternoon and welcome to the Friday edition of 7Investing Now. My name of course, is Daniel Brooks Kline, I am the host of the program going to be a bit of a special program today we are talking about investing internationally with the Anirban Mahanti. Anirban, as you may know, lives in Sydney, Australia and all of us at 7Investing follow investments all around the world, but he has some really unique perspective about sort of how you make those investments, what the red flags are, and where you need to be looking. So we taped this interview a couple of days ago. Feel free to ask us some questions while it’s going on. I’ll come back at the end and say goodbye. But JT Street if you want to hit that interview, it is me it is Anirban Mahanti. Thank you.

Anirban Mahanti welcome to the program. So we talked about this a little bit off air. Before we get to talk to you about international investing. You have come out of lockdown, and you can actually travel relatively soon. Am I am I reading that correctly?

Anirban Mahanti  1:22  Well, yeah, like I mean, I was able to travel in my cars past two weekends, and go more than five kilometers. But you know what I discovered the to my great annoyance. I traveled 45 minutes to go to the beach. And I spent exactly half an hour trying to find parking. And I also now know that I had forgotten about all the tailgaters that exist in Sydney. Everybody tailgates, it’s like, you know, life is not that good. People are tailgating me, I can’t find parking. But yeah, no, you can you can travel more than five kilometers. Yeah.

Dan Kline  1:57  We’re just starting to see the return of like normal traffic, like, there’s more offices that have opened here. So while a lot less people are going to work, there’s like triple the office space. So there’s more people on the road. Like this morning, I went to a new coffee shop just because I wanted to try something different. And it was three miles away. And it took me like 18 minutes and like I would have been able to do in three minutes like a few months ago.

The one thing I will say here is you have a bunch of beach options like Florida is nothing but coasts. So I can go to Palm Beach. And that’s where like the, you know, the rich folks live, that’s $5 an hour to park or I can go to any of the cheaper beaches where parking is plentiful and cheaper. My challenge is, once you’ve spent time in the Bahamas, Florida beaches just don’t seem that nice anymore. And you know, I spend a lot of time in the Bahamas, but that is not – well, it is sort of what we’re talking about. We’re talking about investing internationally. And so this is investing in companies that aren’t headquartered that aren’t based in the US. But why don’t you define that a little bit, because it’s not always super cut and dry.

Anirban Mahanti  3:01  You know, so like the couple of different things, right? So a company, for example, could be headquartered in Australia, maybe in Sydney, but actually could decide to list in the US, right? So you could find a company listed in the US or NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange, which is actually a foreign company in the real way. So a great example is Atlassian like, you know, the greatest software export from Australia, it decided to list overseas.

So that’s an example of a foreign company. The other extreme of a foreign company would be a foreign company that is not listed in the US and is headquartered somewhere else. Another great example for that would be Afterpay, obviously using Australian examples, because you know, I’m from Sydney. So Afterpay, well, it’s now being acquired by square, but afterpay is a company that is headquartered here in Australia listed on the ASX.

 

So a couple of different things to think about. Now, companies could be listed overseas, could be listed in the US, but their headquarters are overseas. That’s one thing to think about when you think about foreign companies. The other thing to think about is often this this is another thing that happens quite often is you have a foreign company. So think about Alibaba its primary listing is in Hong Kong, let’s say. It might have what’s known as American Depository Receipt. So these are basically you know, you quarantine some number of shares with the bank, hold them in trust.

And then that results in issuance of summer shares that then trade on the American market. So if you actually have physical stake in the business, through this depository receipt, it’s held in trust somewhere it has some bank vault or something like that, or in a electronic vault. And then you can trade on those ADR’s or you can buy those ADR’s. So Alibaba is a great example. Tencent is another great example. I believe Tata Motors from India for example, you can buy the ADR is in in the US at the New York Stock Exchange.

And then the final thing to keep in mind is when companies do ADR, some companies actually also look at that as an opportunity to raise money, right? So you might create a secondary listing of a company that has a primary listing, say in another market to the Indian market, Australian market, but you use the secondary listing as an opportunity, it’s a real listing in the US has an opportunity to raise funds. What this does do is creates basically the same stock being listed in two different places, and you’d expect them to trade relatively close to each other. And the reason they would trade close to each other is otherwise there’s arbitrage opportunity, one person manager, a fun magical buy here, sell it there, and, you know, basically mix and match the share. So you know, so that you would expect them to trade pretty close to each other. So that’s something to keep in mind.

Last point is, in this one, I don’t know the mechanics of how exactly it works. But I’ve seen many companies that don’t have ADR, they have over the counter trading via pink slips. They, you know, again, theoretically, they should, like so Afterpay, I think,  for example, had something that was trading over the counter in the US, theoretically, we should trade pretty close to the actual stock trading wherever it is happening. But what tends to happen, though, is that they do some of these OTC things. They can be illiquid. And then you might see actually quite quite a fair amount of gap. So there are different ways of doing that. Did I cover everything?

Dan Kline  6:27  Let me ask one more question. How do you define a company like Sony? So a company that I don’t think their headquarters is Japan, but they have a significant amount of business and presence in the United States? They are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but they’re not an American company, right? Like Sony, you’d have to say is a Japanese company?

Anirban Mahanti  6:47  Yes. So So Sony is a perfect example of, of a company like Atlassian, in that sense, right? So it’s a company that is trading – I don’t know whether Sony actually has a listing primary listing in Japan – probably does. I’m not 100% Sure. So those are multinationals. Right? So I mean, that’s the other thing to keep in mind is that, you know, if you buy Procter and Gamble, that you’re not buying an American company, really, you’re buying a multinational. And that’s the reality for I think, a lot of consumer electronics, a lot of consumer discretionary, you know, even if you’re buying Ford, right, is it you know, yes, the seller vehicles in America, but they sell her vehicles elsewhere as well. So, I mean, that’s the other reality is that companies these days are global. Unless your company is very niche, you’re likely a global company. So you’re, you are a multinational company. So there’s a lot of different ways in which you can define foreign in that sense, right.

Dan Kline  7:46  When you look at a company that’s not primarily doing business in the United States, you brought up Mercado Libre in our in our notes, but obviously there’s, there’s lots of examples of companies that don’t base their business in the US. What do you look at? What’s your prime considerations for how you sort of judge whether that company is investable or not?

Anirban Mahanti  8:07  Yeah, so that’s a fantastic question.

Dan Kline  8:09  Well you wrote it.

Anirban Mahanti  8:13  I’m calling my own questions. Fantastic.

Dan Kline  8:15  Sorry. It’s a joint effort. But I think you did actually write that.

Anirban Mahanti  8:20  Yeah, so look, so a couple different things, right. So you know, the, as you rightly pointed out, right, so Sony is an interesting. It’s a, it’s an international company is a global company, global companies, in many ways easier to invest or understand, right? Because irrespective of where you are, as an investor, you probably have some exposure, especially if it’s a consumer facing company, right? People understand what Sony does people understand what Apple does people understand what Cochrane and gamble does, you probably understand what Heinz does, right?

But if you have a company like Mercado Libre, which is basically focused on Latin America, you know, it’s a marketplace business in large numbers, like an Amazon of Latin America is like an eBay of Latin America, it’s like a PayPal of Latin America, then you really don’t understand it. Because you if you’re not in Latin America, you don’t really see the business in action, you’re not really using it. So that makes it hard to invest. But I think some of the big opportunities also has tend to happen in those sort of scenarios, right?

So what do I look for? I try to think about the problem they’re solving and this this is like, it sounds like a big buzzword problem they’re solving you know, some big things they’re doing. The often the key there in my opinion is to, you know, think okay, we’re building a marketplace that is focused on international markets in like Latin America. But what is special about the marketplace in Latin America? I think that’s the question one needs to think about because marketplace business in the US is probably gonna look very different from the marketplace business in India, which is going to look very different from a marketplace business in Latin America.

So I try to think what the problem that they’re solving and what are the specific issues that they’re handling that are a very relevant in local environments? This is I’m talking about companies that are not global global in the real sense a global company you value it, I think, as you’d value it – but for specific emerging markets, or location specific markets, or the same thing would apply to a company like, you know, Alibaba or 10 cents, right? You really have to understand their local market, where they’re operating and the dynamics of the local markets are credited with that.

Then, of course, the all the other things come into play, right, I would look at you know, the management is, well, you know, management have skin in the game. You know, do the management continuously dilute their shareholders? Are the reporting standards, you know, don’t have good reporting standards? Do they actually report? Honestly, do they have a long term vision, all of those things, I think the standard things that we look for in investing, I think those come into play, but the problem that they’re solving and the opportunity to have long term staying power, right, can they build a moat? Can they you know, but can you build a mold? Can you have the, you know, if you’re building a mold, can you actually strengthen it over time, is what I’m trying to think about that sort of, you know, and, of course.

I guess the most important thing, think about is look at, you know, this is my way of investing, and not everybody will invest this way. But I look at market size, or market cap of the company versus the TAM, right? If the TAM is niche, it’s probably going to be subscale company not interesting. If the TAM is huge. And the company’s market cap relative to Tam is relatively small, then that’s a company that’s of interest to me, because otherwise, there’s so many different companies that one can invest in, right? You know, why? Why try to invest in something that’s hard, if the upside is not there? So that’s the, you know, I try to think of the upside really,

Dan Kline  11:41  TAM, for those who don’t know, is total addressable market. But let me ask the question. So I’ve lost a lot of money. I mean, an astounding lot of money by not investing in MercadoLibre, like I have multiple friends, people, you know, who are big fans of this stock, and here’s why I didn’t invest. I understand that their core business isn’t so much the Amazon side of it, as it is the banking side of it. They are operating in countries where people are unbanked where where the money system isn’t as stable, where they’re sort of providing sort of the full scale like they’re the bank.

They’re the clearinghouse there everything. But I don’t know how big a problem that is. I know it’s a huge market. But I don’t know what political problems they face. I don’t know what resistance. I don’t know if there’s if there’s little criminal elements fighting against that. And that always sort of kept me from investing. Because if you tell me when T-Mobile launched its banking products, which I think has largely been a failure. But my wife could tell me the exact amount of Americans who don’t have a checking account. And how many of them are T-Mobile customers, and I could see the need and go Okay, that’s a good idea. I can’t do that. Because as much as I’d love to go boots on the ground all over the world and talk to a lot of people. That’s very impractical.

Anirban Mahanti  12:54  Yeah, so that’s a great question, look. So I think I sympathize with that view. Because so I have been a Mercado Libre shareholder for a long time. And it’s been really a fantastic company to invest. But does every company turn into Mercado Libre? No. The answer for that is absolutely no, there are many companies that go bust. Right? I had invested in, you know, Luckin Coffee that did not work out very well for me.

Dan Kline  13:19  And this is the third show in a row that Luckin Coffee has come up. And I always resist the urge to gloat. and point out that I was negative Luckin Coffee for business reasons, not for suspected fraud reasons. And no one. Myself and Emily Flippen — nobody else agreed with us. And we had to be very quiet when that all went bad. Because the reason we thought it was gonna go bad was obviously not that they were lying about all their numbers. But yes, that was an ugly one. Yeah,

Anirban Mahanti  13:49  So like given many instances JD.com, which, you know, I had invested in that didn’t really work out. There are a few others that you know, Bilibili, so I, here’s the thing, I think it depends on investing style, really, because when I am looking to invest in a company that operates outside of the main, like, you know, the main global markets, like in specific, which is actually let me rephrase that we operate in a specific market, right? So operates only in China or in Latin America, or only in India, then the only reason in my mind I guess, to invest is the upside. So there really you have to think about the upside and the TAM and things like that. And you have to acknowledge the risk as exactly as you’re saying, like, you know, hard to know, what problem is Mercado Libre is solving right?

No, it is solving a marketplace problem is in the unbanked is a huge deal. The, I think I know because I’m from India, I think one of the things that I realized is companies that can solve. One of the common pitfalls for us to think about is it’s very easy to make this assertion that because Amazon is very successful in the US, somewhat less successful in Europe, it’s going to be very successful even in places like Australia or in India, right?

That is not necessarily true, because one of the problems that happens with companies that are extremely successful elsewhere is that they think that the same business blueprint can be applied in other markets. And often if you are not willing to change the blueprint, you can have opportunities for other companies to succeed. Flipkart, for example, succeeded very well in India, because it had a different group, you know, approach to the market, while in Amazon is also pretty successful in India.

But Amazon is not that great successful, for example, in Australia, right, we have local competitors that have taken its place. So I think, going back to your question, I’d really think about the upside. And if the upside seems large, then I invest fully acknowledging that the downside is there. But you know, if the upside is large, then it’s probably worthwhile. Because again, I’d like to say that the downside is 100%. If you, if you land up with Luckin Coffee, but your upside could be several 1,000%. Right? So if you will end up with a MercadoLibre. So yes, it’s a riskier way of investing. I fully, fully agree with you there. And yeah.

Dan Kline  16:04  I mean, it is either going to be very successful, or it’s not going to work. And obviously recent, last few years suggest it’s going to be really successful. And I it’s funny, when you just brought up companies approaching things differently, I hate to give Facebook a ton of credit, because obviously, that’s a company that doesn’t do everything, right, from a privacy point of view. But from a global point of view, the product Facebook is trying to deliver in the developing world is much more about connectivity than it is about advertising and, and you know, sort of all the things we do that. So that seems to be a company that’s fully sort of acknowledged the idea that Yeah, in parts of the world, Facebook is the internet to people and they have to operate in a different way they do in the US. Can you think of some others, that Microsoft would be another one that I think is done pretty well, globally?

Anirban Mahanti  16:53  So I’ll take a little bit different view on the Facebook, I think Facebook has been a fantastic thing with WhatsApp. Right. So WhatsApp was a fantastic acquisition that Facebook made. And it’s turned really WhatsApp into a communication platform that is like, for example, in India, it’s totally glued in to people.

I think they’re not doing it for any other reason, but advertising. They’re doing it for purely for advertising reasons, but it’s a great play because it creates this network effect where you know, people have WhatsApp. Now the stores have WhatsApp, every shop has WhatsApp. Every trader has you know, like every handyman has WhatsApp, everybody has WhatsApp, it is become the default communication platform. I think that’s a great play because it creates this network effect, right? So it’s basically playing on network effect. And then that sort of translates to overseas people. I need to use WhatsApp, because so many people are on WhatsApp in India that I need to communicate with. So I’m even if I don’t want to use WhatsApp, I’m forced to kind of use WhatsApp, at least in an occasional basis. So I think that’s a great example of, of network effects at work. So some companies are able to exploit opportunities brilliantly, right, I would have expected an Android platform based something to have taken that place. Not WhatsApp. But, you know, yeah, but I think you’re right.

Dan Kline  18:15  It’s very hard to dislodge. once something is there as a basic communication. It’s like, if you told me that a lot of people globally, we’re gonna use WhatsApp and send a text messaging, I would have said, that’s crazy. Because text messaging is so easy, but it isn’t necessarily International, based on how plans work and how, and I know, I have an Instagram account, because some of my friends in Europe, that is the easiest way to communicate with them. I don’t even know how Instagram works. I don’t use it for anything other than messaging.

I’m kidding a little bit. I know how to post a picture. I’m not dumb. But you know, so yeah, you have to look at the opportunity. And obviously, one of the things you mentioned that I thought was interesting is some of these companies can fly under the radar. So is there an opportunity to sort of identify companies like really before they’re they’re getting a lot of news coverage?

Anirban Mahanti  19:00  Yeah so look, MercadoLibre is a perfect example. Right? So if you, you know, you’re looking at MercadoLibre in 2010, it was very much under the radar, right, with a much, much smaller company than it is today. Yeah, that’s an opportunity. In many ways. He, I mean, in general, if you look at sort of that sub, you know, 10 billion market cap companies, those tend to go under the radar, and there is an opportunity, definitely there. Right. And the advantage, I think with under the radar companies is just less coverage, right? Less coverage, less number of analysts following it, therefore, you know, fewer price targets fewer, fewer opportunities for you know, the wider Wall Street to know about it less, you know, less following, that creates a lot of volatility. And it also creates I think, a price arbitrage opportunity for the long term investor right, you know, if you believe that the company is not being properly valued, then you can sort of take that opportunity to invest ahead of the curve right and you have to be fully acknowledged there’s gonna be a lot of volatility in it.

Dan Kline  20:00  Yeah, and even for a company that’s following SEC rules or SEC-like rules and its reporting structure, if there’s less people on that earnings call, there’s less questions. And one of the things I’ve noticed in reading an earnings report that oftentimes the news-iest thing is like the last guy who asked a question during the conference call. There are a lot of companies that don’t have anyone on those calls, or only have one or two people on those calls that might be a little too close to the company. Let’s ask one last question.

Before we start to wrap this up. We’re going to talk about red flags in a minute, but I want to talk about political risk. So we’ve seen with China, some I would argue, arbitrary, but I think an expert on the Chinese government would not say arbitrary, but there’s been a crackdown on some pretty giant platforms. And then there’s been some others that haven’t been able to go public, because the government maintains a very strong role. But that role has been a moving target. The rules are not nothing, things don’t change here in the US, but it’s difficult for things to change. They don’t tend to move quickly. And we’ve seen some pretty quick changes in China.

Anirban Mahanti  21:05  That’s yeah, so I think this is not just a china thing. This is this is a thing that sort of the developing versus the developed economy. situation, right. I mean, in the developed markets, you know, whether or not Apple is a monopoly is going to be discussed for a decade before. You know, they you come to a decision as to whether it’s a monopoly or not, by the time actually decided there is a monopoly or not probably if it is in monopoly, the monopoly is gone. And if and if it was not a monopoly by the time maybe it is a monopoly. So I think the institutions that look at these things are slower moving in many other places. This lack of sort of institutional, I guess, oversight are multiple institutions that have to be oversight things, and therefore there can be more unilateral decisions, there can be government changes that change – result in significant changes in how businesses operate. Right. In a great example. So like, you know, in, in India back in the 70s, I think the government basically just nationalized stuff, right?

It’s like a forced seller, that’s not a good position to be in if you’re a forced seller. So those sort of things can and do happen. Right? And so that’s why I read them as a higher risk. So political risk is very high. In many in many cases, that’s something to again, fully acknowledge, this is not fraud related, this is like, and the same thing, like, for example, the stuff that’s going on with Alibaba and so on, some of that, I mean, could make absolute sense. So like, so like, technically, it makes sense that Alibaba for example, might not be able to impose these restrictions on merchants that say, okay, you can only sell on on the BABA platform or whatever, and not nowhere else. So if you do, then they’re going to, you know, do something, right. That sounds anti-competitive, and therefore, the government coming in and trying to stop it. Seems to be the right thing to do. But here’s the deal, right? This thing has been going on for many years, it was okay, then it’s not okay.

So it’s hard to, I guess, speculate based on how to extrapolate based on past growth. Like, you know, as an analyst, we look at what has happened in the past, as sort of a guide to what may happen in the future based on the time and things like that, which you may not be able to do. So I think that’s something to consider. Should I guess the bigger question you’re trying to ask is, is that it a deterrent for people to stop? I think, stop investing? And I think the answer to that would be, it will depends on your risk tolerance, right? I mean, if your risk tolerance is low, probably steer clear, right? I mean, he and the thing is that you you don’t everybody doesn’t need to go and venture there. Right. So this is a higher risk, for sure. I mean, right.

Dan Kline  23:55  And I think on some level, you do need to understand the bigger picture. So you mentioned like nationalizing and people ask me all the time, like, what if China was to nationalize Starbucks? Well, China wants global investment.

And if China was to nationalize Tesla, or Starbucks or whatever else it might be, then other companies aren’t going to invest there. And I think that’s a pretty simple equation. Now, could Venezuela decide to nationalize? Like some US businesses? Yes, because the ramifications aren’t the same. And the leadership is perhaps not as long term. So you have to sort of be a student of the world of the globe. And I’m not saying there’s no risk in China of that happening.

Obviously, there could be, I don’t wanna say regime change, but there could be thinking change within you know, what the government is that decides No, we don’t want this money or we don’t want these, these American companies and you know, Disney has been the beneficiary and suffered from the sort of ever changing desire to have American movies or not have American movies. But that being said, what other red flags we’ll close with this. What other red flags should I be looking for? If I’m going to invest in non US companies? And I really haven’t This is an area lacking in my portfolio.

Anirban Mahanti  25:08  Yeah, so I think the biggest red flag is, this is like a red flag from an investor’s point of view, right. And investors in a, we are always looking for alpha, and then you’re in the hunt for alpha. One might find, oh, this business is growing really quickly. You know, nobody’s really falling paying attention to it. But it could be that it’s growing quickly. Because it’s subscale, like, you know, when we were talking about you were talking about giving an example, saying, well, it’s easy to grow from, you know, four subscribers, or four users to like eight users to like 16 users. That sounds like a very fast growth, but it is growing from a very small base. So I think, consider the base. And then consider the scale, right? I mean, maybe you have 10 million users in a platform today, but is the ceiling 20 million? Well, that’s a bit of a problem, right? The other thing, this is not talked about a lot, but I’ve seen this, when I was in by following small cabinet, especially swelling, microcap in Australian stocks.

On the surface, a technology will play it great, and maybe the technology is actually great. The opportunity sounds large. But often what happens is, if the business started off with the wrong pricing plans, and the wrong structures, and the wrong sort of business, go to market strategy is probably the right word. Once you’ve started on a bad footing, it’s very hard to get out of that bad feeling.

And classic one that I’ve seen is poor pricing. Like if you, if you design a product and you sub if it’s a substance, that’s called a subscription product, and let’s say it’s like, streaming, right, and you start a streaming service at $2.99, you’re gonna have a hard time taking it to 1$9.99 in five years, it’s really hard. Because the subscriber base really has this expectation built in that was $2.99, maybe you can make it $3.99, maybe you can make it $4.99. Beyond that, maybe it’s gonna be really hard, right? So I think knowing your product, and knowing the competition, and knowing how much you can charge for it is a skill. And a lot of smaller companies, I think, go into the pitfall that oh, we need to survive, we need to get free cash flow, we infer that if this pricing is okay, but then basically you have cut your TAM in maybe 1/10th, because you didn’t actually charge what you could. So this is one thing. The other thing is of course scale, sometimes you could just be a sub scale business. And that’s, again, not may be of interest.

Dan Kline  27:37 And we’ve seen that pricing issue with some very established companies, I’ll give an example of a product I love that was way overpriced, and I think it killed its market reach. And that’s the Microsoft Surface. So when that first came out, the base model was more than a comparable iPad and you needed all the accessories you needed the keyboard, you need the cover you so all of a sudden, I could buy an $80, Amazon Kindle that does all the entertainment things. I could buy an iPad that does all of the business productivity and all the entertainment things, maybe that iPad would be $399 or $499. Or I could spend $900 and buy a Surface and I was lucky enough I worked at Microsoft, they sent me one. But that being said, that product was dead in the water. And I think we’ve seen that not that dead, it’s done. okay. But it really could have been a new form factor.

And we’ve seen that and I guess there’s a difference between something like say, like an Oculus, or a HoloLens where the goal is to like, start at a premium and then eventually make it a mainstream product. Or, like, if you come out with a new gaming console, I don’t care how great your gaming console is, if it’s $1500 nobody’s gonna buy it. It’s not it can’t possibly be 11 $100 better than an Xbox or, or whatever it is. So pricing can can hit at all areas. Anything else we should worry about as a red flag before we close the show here and you go have some coffee, and I go have some scotch.

Anirban Mahanti  29:04  Yeah. So we’ve talked about, I think we talked about the subscale thing, I think the regulatory framework is something that you need to understand and sometimes can be too complex to understand that can be an issue. The other thing that is important to realize in certain markets.  So a great example would be banking, right in Australia is basically like a four pillar banking system. We’ve got four big banks, basically that rule the roost. And if you have to be a new bank that you know, you just can’t be a new bank that comes from America and try to invade this market is there going to be a tough market to invade and win because you’ve got established incumbents? So understanding the local dynamics and the play is important.

So you know, or while it sounds great to have, you know, maybe Square and Afterpay they’re gonna get together and change banking altogether. It’s going to take a long time to change banking. How banking is done in Australia because, again, the incumbents are not going to give away that easily. So often I find that it’s easier in easier to innovate and grow in new markets, new services. And new services because people don’t pay that much attention. Well, it’s very difficult to you know, Upstart is not in to be an Upstart and disrupt an existing area, which has got strong competitors. So I guess those are sort of some some things to think about.

Dan Kline  30:30  It’s very difficult to beat an incumbent and I’ll give an example we talked about a lot -Square, there’s huge growth for Square I’d argue it’s companies that didn’t have a point of sale system that then added one or new businesses. I don’t think there are very many established retail businesses that decided to have Square as their principal, I can think of one there’s one coffee shop near me that that their POS died and they went to Square but it’s a one location store. Their success has been attrition and growth and new businesses coming in. I don’t know why you’d buy like an old school point of sale system when you could, you know, buy a Square and outfitted cheaply. We’re going to keep talking about international investing, we’re going to continue to try to grow our perspective on this and sort of break out of you know some of the America bias because there are great opportunities all over the world.

There are also risks and dangers here in the US and of course all over the world. Anirban, I can see the sun coming up so you know go out take your dog for a walk. We will see you back on 7Investing Now. If not next week, certainly very very soon.

Thank you Anirban. Thank you all for watching. If you would like to get in touch with us, it is very easy to do you can send us an email at info@7investing.com. That’s questions about your membership, questions about becoming a member and if you are not a member, what are you doing? Go to 7investing.com/subscribe, use the code now you’ll even save $10 off of your first month. It is $49 a month. The best deal you can possibly get in investing. 7 unbelievably diverse talented lead advisors, each giving you their highest conviction stock piclk each month. If you would like to follow us on social media, we are @7investing that is @7investing. It’s Friday. I hope you all get to leave work soon. I know that’s not the case for me. We have a busy afternoon here at 7investing. But that is not a problem because we love what we do. We will see you back here on Monday. Thank you Anirban Mahanti. Thank you JT Street. Bye.

 

 

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