Thursday, October 28, 2010

Is Google a monopoly?

When we look for investments we look for businesses that are monopolistic. This is because they are able to earn more and stops competitors from competing.  As a shareholder, it means the company is able to grow cashflow with ease.
Monopolistic companies either due to
  1. business economics
  2. regulation
Is desired but can change with time.
Here is a good illustration on some of our past anti-trust cases and one potential future one: Google.
Personally, I think google have an advantage. But really technology is a space that even if you are the biggest, your economic moat or monopolistic advantage can shrink just as easily. I don’t think they are a monopoly.

This article was original posted in Investment Moats. You can read the article here @ Investment Moats. Investment Moats discusses dividend investing, income strategies and high yield investing.

K-Green Trust's yield may not be as high as you think

I written an article over at Investment Moats indicating my purchase of K-Green Trust. From the looks of it, it doesn't look very appealing.


From this table we approximate based on 2011 dividends per share. On current yield its 6.98%. That looks good.
However, the yields over the concession years looks like those of SGS bonds.
The yield on Senoko is 2.883% and the yield on NEWater looks close to 0.971%!
If we factor in an inflation growth of 3%, the yield goes up to 3.4%, 2.57% and 1.21%.
Even then, a total return after god know, 25 years its 24% or 65% looks really medicore.
Now this is on top of the NAV going down to zero. All in all this is starting to look like a very bad proposition.
I am gonna seriously evaluate my investments. I have sent some enquiries to K-Green. lets see how responsive their investor relations is.

This article was original posted in Investment Moats. You can read the article here @ Investment Moats