YTL has done it again

YTL bought Niseko Village, 617 hectares of land for 223 million and then sell Hilton Niseko Village for 222 million to Starhill REIT. In other words, YTL got 200-room Green Leaf Hotel and two 18-hole golf courses, and 155ha of leased ski mountain land on which are situated seven ski lifts and 15 ski trails for RM 1 million. The master is at it again.

Inflation is everywhere…and yet

the price of a Mcdonald’s burger is cheaper in a lot of countries during burger consumption off peak hour

e.g. weekday night in Hong Kong

        weekday noon in Malaysia Singapore and other countries..wonder why? It is not a coincidence

FSBM Plaza - AmFirst REIT

There is a piece of information missing glaringly from the announcement in Bursa recently – the net property yield of the purchase. A back of the envelope calculation has yielded a maximum net property yield of around 8.3% for the 1st 3 yrs, and around 8.5% for the next 3 yrs. Since this purchase is totally debt funded, of course we will have to deduct the cost of the debt, which will be around 4.5 % – 6 %, depending on whether the loan will be on fixed rate or floating rate. Ignoring the 1% acquisition fee, 2.x% of 51 million will up the current DPU by around 0.xx%.

Quality of innovation

as described by Prof Desai

= extent of pain suffered by customers(the higher the pain the larger the value)

+number of potential customers

+life of the innovation

+difficulty in assembling a solution as well as difficulty in copying likely innovation opportunities

 

Misc

-when there is a pain, there is a need

-not every creative is an innovation

-pain point

-some innovation are only meant for specific market/industry

-FIGURE OUT how to APPLY TECHNOLOGY in ANOTHER AREA – technology for one purpose can be used/transported for another purpose

-how to go from functional(coffee shop, cafe) to emotional(Starbucks, Old Town White Coffee)

lifestyle economy – e.g. emotion(refer to above)

The THIRD PLACE – home, work, starbucks

A Produce Innovation’s lifepath

Special –> Enterprise –> Departmental –>Personal –> Mobile –>Pocket

For example from Giant Machine to Ipad

Video –> World’s first flying car

http://kidstube.com/play.php?vid=7870

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What are your biggest fears

This blog started off as some sort of a venture which faltered. and then it became my pet for my ideas..and then it turned into a market commentary site..and now I gona deviate part of it back to its origin – more of an idea site..do you still remember what were your ambitions while you were in primary education? I do..I wished to be scientist. wished to be entrepreneur..wished to be an inventor…Well, I am not in any now..but the silver lining is, i still retain the inquisitiveness in me, the entrepreneurial spirit(to my VC friend, I will be back) and thoughts, and finally, the Creating Mind(ala Five MInds for the Future)which mixes disparate ideas into something different. Recently, I have started to firing salvos at a few different areas, putting ideals into motions. As I realized that I do not have to be the owner of the end solution/product/result, I need to contribute the idea, the prototype, or the impetus of a workable solution only. I have been to a few occasions recently, I can see the sparkles in the inventor’s eye. If compared to a lot of dead walking zombies on the road, it is really between heaven and earth. I can feel the enthusiasm of a 1st year undergrads (Woot!) versus the bland expression of someone who has been working for years. I don’t ever want to be like the next guy/girl in the talks/seminars, where nothing is done aftermath and life goes on. If this long winded article lights up a chord in you or you have been slugging it out despite all odds, get in touch =)

Creativity

We live in an age when the most valuable asset any economy can have is the ability to be creative - to spark and imagine new ideas, be they Broadway tunes, great books, iPads or new cancer drugs. And where does creativity comes from?

"To be creative requires divergent thinking (generating many unique ideas) and then convergent thinking (combining those ideas into the best result).  It comes from being exposed to divergent ideas and cultures and peoples and intellectual disciplines. One thing we must know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other(rojak, in my own terms =) )

Leonardo da Vinci was a great blah blah and blah, eane(and) each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinker. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or the mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the great breakthrough is found




Thomas Friedman

Gandhian Innovation - Bharti Airtel

Read an article in HBR recently titled “Gandhian Innovation” by C.K. Prahalad and R.A. Mashelkar What captured my eyeballs was that the paragraph talking about how Bharti Airtel was losing money until it decided to change tact from looking at profit margin to looking at revenue as key business ratio. I am suspecting Singtel learnt from their partner, Bharti Airtel and brought it over to Singapore. First with its prepaid business since few years ago(you can note this by looking at Singtel’s  prepaid users net adds  per quarter or looking at ARPU that keep making new lows.) and now expanding the same strategy to mio TV line of business as well.  Starhub looks increasingly fragile to me. Bharti Airtel, 1 cent per min in India…hmmmm