Crbus Parking Blog

This new launch takes a tried-and­ tested approach and applies it globally.

Standard Life

 

TRUE ANALYST

All businesses start the same way: with a product or idea, and someone with vision to bring it to life. A product and the people behind it are two of a business’s most valuable assets. Get the right mix and the results can be spectacular. If you don’t have enough money to finance your idea, use title loan calculator to check how much you can apply for. Smaller companies tend to be nimble and dynamic, often coming up with a product to fill a niche in the market. If successful, growth can be rapid, but some will inevitably struggle. What is happening in the wider economy is less important because conquering an untapped segment of the market means growth is sustainable.

Technological advancements over the past 30 years, such as the internet, have enabled many smaller firms to level the playing field with established rivals. Take Rightmove, for example. Founded in 2000 it is now the UK’s largest estate agency service with an 82% share of the online property search market. The company floated in 2006 at £4 a share and today shares change hands for over £11 each. Investing with the right fund manager is important as smaller companies are higher risk.

 

Harry Nimmo has crafted a formidable reputation managing the SLI UK Smaller Companies Fund (which has reached capacity, and is no longer seeking new investments). Since launch in 1997 that fund has returned an impressive 463.3%, compared to 175.2% for the average fund in the sector, although past performance is not a guide to the future. Now Harry Nimmo is going global.

 

When the late Lord Weinstock, the former Chief Executive of GEC, became disillusioned with his wealth managers, he set up his own family office to look after his interests. It was named ‘Troy’ after his Derby-winning racehorse and has evolved into an accomplished fund management business.

 

The Troy philosophy is if you can reduce losses during downturns, you don’t have to regain as much when markets recover as the graph to the right illustrates. Like all stock market investments, however, their funds will fall in value as well as rise so you could get back less than you invest.

 

The manager of the Troy Trojan Income Fund, Francis Brooke, often lets cash build up if he believes he will be experienced team in the US, home to 50% of the global smaller company universe. This is why we were particularly excited to hear of the new SLI Global Smaller Companies Fund which is designed to capture the increasing array of opportunities Harry Nimmo is finding globally, including in higher risk emerging markets. The fund really represents a natural extension to a tried and tested approach.

Over the past two decades Oakland used its large share of prime waterfront to in­stall efficient containerized-cargo handling equipment. With its convenient rail and highway connections, Oakland prospered in the highly competitive world of Pacific Basin trade and far surpassed San Francisco as the bay area’s busiest port.

 

“We were hungrier and more aggressive than San Francisco,” city manager David Self told me in Oakland’s old, ornate city hall. “I can see us becoming the West Coast trade center. We have the hardware at the port, and we’re now beginning to cultivate some of the cultural and international trade aspects that the port is bringing.”

 

The city is banking on its newfound pros­perity to revitalize the downtown area. On Self’s wall hangs a drawing of a 130-block area showing plans for a new convention center, hotel, international trade center, and renovations of Victorian houses into shops and restaurants.

Self talked of the problems of a city whose population had dropped from 370,000 to 340,000 over the past 20 years and also consider loan consolidation plans. Learn more about payday loan consolidation. We joked about the comment by author Gertrude Stein, who once wrote of Oakland: “There is no there there.”

“We have our negatives,” he said. “We’ve had a history of people attractive to the news media—Huey Newton, the Black Panthers, Sonny Barger and his Hell’s Angels.

“Our population, which is 45 percent black, has begun growing again—and we now have some very active neighborhood organizations.”

 

But Oakland may have to start looking over its shoulder and northward up the shore to Richmond. That city has embarked on a massive waterfront redevelopment project that already includes some of the most modern container-handling facilities in the world—with room for more.

 

Lance Burris, Richmond’s former direc­tor of economic development, thinks it’s ironic that his city’s fortunes have been tied to the Japanese—first during World War II, now through trade. “The city bought 22 mil­lion dollars’ worth of real estate along the waterfront. Most of it was vacant—the site of the old Kaiser shipyards. That’s where Liberty ships and Victory ships that helped defeat the Japanese were built.

 

“The basin is where our country’s future is,” Burris said. “The Japanese lost the war, but now we’re bringing in their Hondas.”

 

When I drove through the redevelopment site, I saw that some old buildings still stood, their windows broken, their yards sprouted with weeds. Vast areas were freshly bull­dozed. Richmond’s waterfront plan calls for 200,000 square feet of commercial space, 3,500 condominiums and rental units, a 2,000-berth marina, park, and esplanade, woven together by trails and paths.

 

Tourism Outstrips City’s Industry

 

Despite what she sees happening at the ports across the bay, Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco’s brisk, plain-speaking mayor, remains optimistic.

“Oakland did ace us out of a lot of busi­ness,” she told me. “Where there were once about 60,000 blue-collar jobs on our docks, there are now 10,000. Bringing back mari­time business to the port is a high priority.

 

“But tourism is now our number one in­dustry,” she added. “Last year we had more than 3.5 million visitors.”

 

The largest new waterfront development is Pier 39, a collection of 150 restaurants and shops and a marina close by a much older competitor, Fisherman’s Wharf.

 

“Pier 39 is the first big waterfront rede­velopment this city was able to get off the ground, the first that replaces our rotting pier sheds with something that opens up the water for people to enjoy,” Mayor Feinstein said. “I want it to succeed. There’s plenty of room for shipping and tourism in San Fran­cisco. All exciting port cities have both.”

On the way out from the central desert we had an unexpected encounter which, brief as it was, had important consequences for me. It happened on the eighth day after leaving the Sip Wells. We were still deep in the Kalahari, moving slowly through a difficult tract of country into which the rains as yet had been unable to break. Since it was already late in the year, the plight of the desert was frightening. Almost all the grass was gone and only the broken-off stubble of another season left here and there, so thin, bleached and translucent that its shadow was little more than a darker form of the sunlight. The trees, most of them leafless, stood exposed against the penetrating light like bone in an X-ray plate. The little leaf there was looked burnt out and ready to crumble to ash on touch. Under such poor cover the deep sand was more conspicuous than ever, saffron at dawn and dusk, and sulphur in between. There was no shade anywhere solid enough to cool its burning sur­face. What there was, seemed scribbled on it by the pointed thorns like script on some Dead Sea scroll.

There was no game. Yet the animals had been that way and clearly found it wanting. They had dug all over the surface with hoof and claw for the roots and tubers on which their lives depend until the rains come, leaving large holes and trenches behind. Vast areas looked as if a bitter battle had been fought over them, and there was always a moment at the climax of the day when the sunstroke racking the earth produced the hallucination that one was moving across the pockmarked surface of some yellow wasteland of the moon. Even the birds were rare and in­conspicuous, except for a vulture always dangling over the death-bed scene like a spider suspended from the blue on a silky thread of air. The few birds we saw no longer sang, and darted about their business with a desperate look.

What we did see in plenty, though, were snakes. In all the years I have known the Kala­hari I have never seen so many nor any as splendid. I expect it was because there was little grass or leaf to hide them. The hotter and more barren the desert became, the more we saw of them. How right they looked in that desolate setting! There were horned little vipers as still as petrified wood and bright as ceiling light fixtures against a setting sun. There were heavy puff-adders coiled like slave-bangles made of a metal with a sullen glow, and large golden cobras pulling stitches of glistening twist through their torn cover of sand. Above all there were black mam­bas alert, shining and unafraid sitting upright in the sun. There was one even who clearly had been bird-nesting in vain and swung nonchalantly by the tail over our heads from the branch of a tree.

The farther we went in this way, the more we ourselves became affected by the desperation of the land. Though we carried enough food and water for our needs, the thirst, hunger and fear of the earth became our own. What made things worse was that the formidable thunder clouds which came storming over the horizon in the early afternoons seemed powerless to break through the iron-ring of drought around us. We would watch them grow until they stood over us like atomic explosions in the South Pacific. Their shadows would tumble from a far silver crest in folds of purple over our smarting senses, the darkened distances glitter with the flashes of their lightning, the earth shake with thunder and the wide desert suddenly shrink small into a posture of submission at their feet. Nothing, we thought, could now prevent it raining. Once even we saw the rain drops tumbling out of the base of the greatest of all the piles of digital camera. They came swarming down towards us like bees out of a startled hive, but before they could reach us the heat rising upwards from the earth evaporated them. Then as always the wind got up, spinning violently in the Dervish dust before charging upwards to shatter the great formations of cloud. We would watch them decline, torn and forlorn in the red of an apocalyptic sunset, and creep with the despair of the earth at heart into our beds on the sand. Before sleeping I would often think that my countrymen, of whom so many perished trying to cross the desert, named it well when they called it simply ‘The Great Thirstland’.

Then, on the morning of the eighth day after leaving the Sip Wells, the sun rose faster and angrier than usual. There seemed to be no period of transition even, short as it is in these latitudes at that time of year. At one minute it was dark and cool, the next blindingly light and hot.

By noon we were all searching for somewhere to rest our vehicles and ourselves. When a flag of green with silver stars and strips showed up, I was prepared for it to be a mirage, an illusion of the day, but nevertheless steered for it. Slowly stars and strips diminished, the green increased and finally there stood, like a miracle before un­believers, a number of camel-thorn trees in leaf. They were giants of their kind, cunning and very old, and what added to the wonder of finding them there was the knowledge that they were growing in a part of the desert which was not typical camel-thorn country at all. Usually they grow in great numbers in their own favourite sands much farther away to the south, where they give vast areas of the desert an astonishingly park­like appearance. But here there was only this lone outpost, the survivor perhaps of a great colony when the desert was kinder to trees than it is today.