Kuroto Fund, L.P. - Q1 2021 Letter
Dear Partners and Friends,
perormance & portfolio
Kuroto Fund gained +9.5% in the first quarter of 2021. By comparison, the EM index was up +2.2% in the first quarter. For the year to date through April 22nd, we estimate the fund was up +14%. [1]
the software revolution & our portfolio
It has been almost 10 years since the publication of Marc Andreessen’s op-ed titled “Why Software Is Eating the World.”[1] Andreesen presciently predicted that almost every company would become a software company. At the time, the software revolution had just begun disrupting emerging markets businesses. Safaricom’s adoption of mobile payment technology is one of a handful of emerging market businesses that took advantage of the software revolution before developed market peers. With the exception of a few early adopters, however, broad swaths of emerging markets remained largely untouched by the software revolution in 2011.
Ten years later, the software revolution has touched every company in which we invest. As we made clear in our year-end letter, we invest based on fundamentals and not on tech-transformation hype. That said, it would be a mistake to conclude that our investments are on the wrong side of the software revolution. As better-business value investors, we partner with management teams that are constantly improving their competitive positions. In recent years, such improvements have increasingly meant aggressively embracing the software revolution. The balance of this letter will detail the extent to which tech is shaping our top top-five investments.
FPT – 22.7% of 3.31.21 capital
FPT is no longer the low-cost technology outsourcing business it was a decade ago. Through a combination of management ambition and meritocratic culture, FPT has moved up the value chain and now works with several of the world’s largest companies, like Airbus and Toyota. Going forward, FPT intends to secure more complicated software consulting work based on the company’s problem-solving expertise rather than its large workforce of software developers and integrators. In addition to its software and core broadband business, FPT is building data centers in Vietnam to support its domestic cloud and digital entertainment offerings. We expect these initiatives to generate years of 20%+ earnings growth for FPT. At less than 20x ’21 earnings, we continue to believe FPT is undervalued.
MTN Ghana – 16.2% of 03.31.21 capital
MTN Ghana copied Safaricom’s playbook and built a mobile payments business in Ghana on the back of its traditional telecom business. MTN’s management is taking this model a step further by creating a platform modeled after Tencent’s WeChat. Last year, MTN introduced a messaging and entertainment platform that allows connectivity between 2G and 4G users, an important step in a country like Ghana where only half the population has smart phones. The application has an open API ecosystem that encourages startups to develop applications and leverage MTN’s user base. If successful, MTN will become more than just a telecom or mobile-payments company; it will be the go to place for Ghanaians to access the internet. With rapid growth in its core businesses and a valuation of 7x ’21 earnings, the value of this initiative is clearly not priced into the stock.
GT Bank – 10.4% of 3.31.21 capital
GT Bank, like Safaricom in Kenya and MTN in Ghana, manages a digital payments business facilitated by mobile phones. Last year, GT Bank’s management announced plans to move its digital payments business into a separate subsidiary in order to free it from Nigeria’s cumbersome banking regulations. GT Bank estimates that its payments subsidiary already controls a mid-teens percentage of the payment ecosystem in Nigeria. Following the spinout of its payment business, GTB intends to push out point-of-sale devices to the thousands of small merchants that already bank with the group. The bank also wants to add an insurance, asset management, and a pension business to round out their payment ecosystem. As a sign of its seriousness, GTB’s celebrated CEO—widely considered one of the top bankers in Africa—is stepping down from the bank to head this new business. With the total business trading at book value on a sum of the parts basis, the digital payments business is currently being ascribed little value.
Logo Yazlim – 7.9% of 3.31.21 capital
Logo is a software business with the leading ERP market share amongst small and medium sized enterprises in Turkey. Logo is in the process of migrating its customer base from on-premise software to the cloud. Last year, Logo jumpstarted this initiative with the purchase of a human resources software application called Peoplise, as well as the roll-out of its low-cost micro-SME cloud-ERP offering, Isbasi. Peoplise is an application that customers can add onto their existing Logo ERP product. Isbasi is a new product akin to Quickbooks that targets the hundreds of thousands of Turkish SMEs that can only afford a SAAS solution. While Logo is trading at 20x ’21 earnings, the company gets cheap quickly given its earning’s growth.
TBC – 06.2% of 03.31.21 capital
TBC Bank launched Georgia’s first fully digital bank, Space, in 2018. Already a leader in mobile and internet banking, TBC went a step further and created a challenger bank to their own ecosystem. After testing and refining it in Georgia for two years, TBC is launching it this year in Uzbekistan, an underbanked country with 10x as many people as Georgia. Space, combined with TBCs recent purchase of Uzbekistan’s largest mobile money transfer and payments business, puts TBC in a perfect position to capture Uzbekistan’s large, unbanked population. Trading at 70% of book value, we believe the market has yet to recognize the bank’s long-term growth potential.
Sincerely,
Sean Fieler Brad Virbitsky
END NOTES
[1] Performance stated for Kuroto Fund, L.P. Class A on a net basis. An investor’s performance may differ based on timing of contributions, withdrawals, share class, and participation in new issues. Unless otherwise noted, all company-specific data is derived from internal analysis, company presentations, or Bloomberg. Company valuations and exposures are as of 12.31.20.









