Category: Frontier Markets

Mongolia – Is This Guy for Real?

Mongolia has a kind of raw seething grittiness to it. It is like a brand spanking new 8 liter V-10 engine with the chassis in place but the rest of the machine is a mishmash of bolted on parts, the seats come from an abandoned Lada, the interior is decorated

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Starting Up in Myanmar

In a world simply drowning in debt, the most egregious debt ever recorded in the worlds history in fact, we find ourselves with a unique situation where previously backward broken shell shocked countries such as Myanmar have one element of risk which we can eliminate from our risk profile when

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What Do Supertankers and Southeast Asia Have in Common?

My son just read me an interesting fact. Did you know that a typical oil tanker will take up to 3km and 45 minutes to complete a 180 degree turn at normal sea speed? He is busy reading me all the facts about the Titanic. He’s enthralled with it because

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It’s Crazy What This Commodity is Being Sold For!

Internally we have a running joke here. We talk of the “Yeti” deal. Like the Yeti, everyone has heard about the deal but few have seen it, and the longer this persists the greater the doubt that the “Yeti” actually exists. The “Yeti deal” is a project that I began

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Iraq: A View from the Inside Out

Today I bring you insights from Kevin Virgil, an ex army ranger, and the founder and managing director of Frontera news an emerging markets news portal. Once again, Iraq is in the news. The Western media has interrupted its 24-hour Kardashian coverage to bring stories of fearsome insurgents who appeared

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North Korea: Is Perception Different from Reality?

This will be the third and final instalment (to better understand the context I encourage you to read Part I and Part II) on a short series of articles on the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka North Korea). For the past three weeks I have argued that, while it

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Four Reasons to Keep an Eye on North Korea

By: Kevin Virgil Last week I wrote about the possibilities of increasing change in North Korea, and its importance in the complex Northeast Asian region, which is quickly becoming a fault line between the world’s three leading powers. I have been writing for a couple of years now and it

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