CAPE TOWN - Professionals now believe that if you are looking for real returns, offshore is the place to go. So which company do you invest in out of the thousands available overseas?
Walter Aylett, founder of Aylett and Company Fund Managers, is one of those managers and he has a fund that has the majority of its assets invested overseas. His biggest holding is the Washington Post. He explained why in the Market Review podcast.
"Well that's a fantastic company because most people think it's a newspaper company - it's essentially the second biggest education company in the world and setting up education business is an expensive process and they are a management team that are not focused on the short term share price but investing for the long term and over the years they've been building these barriers to entry, not only on campuses but on internet type education based systems."
"They're an excellent management team and they also have an incredible amount of assets on their balance sheet that no one seems to really recognise. Like at one stage they had $1bn surplus on their pension fund, which they can use to fund severance costs."
"They had a large stake in Berkshire Hathaway and a company called Corinthian, which is worth about $700m. they have a cable company, which generates about - if my memory serves about $175m of cash flow and then you've got the newspaper and TV stations."
"The newspapers are in decline, as we know, but they run a very good paper and they're not a management team that just pump money into a hole and not get the money back."
"TV stations are also in decline but not to the same extent. We will still watch, for example this year, the Winter Olympics on terrestrial TV as well I think it's the mid-term elections in the States. So they'll make some more money from that", explained Aylett.
He went on to expand on two of the Washington Post's "moats" that he believes give the company a strong durable competitive advantage, "In Washington Post, they have a management team that is prepared to sacrifice short term returns to build these moats up and most listed companies don't have that luxury and they've got huge amounts of cash flow, which is generated by the other businesses that can fund that growth."
"The second thing is education is not a grudge purchase. We all want to be educated to do well in our business, so as you build up your scale, your costs don't grow as much as your revenue can grow and those skills and developing those campuses and those data bases and those knowledge centres don't come over night."
"They're quite hard to replace - for example, if you think of Harvard, there is only one Harvard and there's only one Princeton and they're doing that as well."
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