PSA Interviews & Media Coverage – 2021
IG UK
31 December 2021
IG Outlook 2022: Tech sector with Pelham Smithers
How will the tech sector perform in 2022? Having experienced semiconductor shortages, supply chain disruption and Chinese intervention in China tech, IGTV’s Jeremy Naylor caught up with Pelham Smithers, founder of Pelham Smithers Associates, about the themes likely to develop in 2022.
Financial Times
17 November 2021
Is Japan still a value trap?
“…Pelham Smithers of Pelham Smithers Associates makes the case that there is an exceptionally strong market within the wider Japanese stock market. “Aggregate performance has been very poor, but vast swaths of the market have performed exceptionally well,” he says. Smithers points to the great performance of various actively managed Japan funds as evidence (to pick one example, the Baillie Gifford Japan Trust has appreciated 440 per cent in a decade, in pounds)……”
Financial Times
2 July 2021
How to beat the private equity buyers
“…However, as Pelham Smithers of Pelham Smithers Associates points out, there is another complication here. The criteria on which PE target companies are valued in the market is not exactly a secret. The “knowledge is distributed around the market”. Everyone knows the current price of a listed company, the price they themselves would pay, and the price a PE firm could pay…….”
Financial Times
9 June 2021
Unhedged: we are Japan, circa 1987
“…Pelham Smithers, who leads a London research shop that has long focused on Japan, adds an important point. It was easier to tolerate high asset prices in the late ’80s because, as in America today, many companies were producing genuinely excellent results:
“The summer of 1988 is when things like steel companies went through the roof in Japan. It wasn’t a pure commodities boom, it was companies that were doing really well in the real world. They were raising prices, increasing volumes and not facing rising costs . . . businesses that were suddenly making a lot of money were on the rise. The economy had recovered, the yen was weakening and these were fixed-cost businesses, a triple-whammy.”
……”
Financial Times
4 March 2021
Flash rally in Bank of Japan shares leaves brokers perplexed
“…In a note to clients this week, the veteran Japan equities analyst Pelham Smithers said that the experience of BoJ shares in the 1980s had provided a useful warning of the meme stock concept. For those that got in and out early, there was a chance of some profit. But liquidity — as with many modern-day hot stocks such as US retailer GameStop — is the challenge…….”
Financial Times
12 February 2021
Apple/Nissan: check your privilege
“…Apple is strong. Nissan is weak. There would be no doubt which would be in charge. Apple’s $77bn cash pile is triple Nissan’s market capitalisation. The lossmaking Japanese group is in the midst of a painful restructuring.
Nissan knows how to make electric cars after a decade of experience with its Leaf vehicle. It needs help to progress. Its global market share in EVs is a paltry 2 per cent, notes Julie Boote at Pelham Smithers……”
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