Kuroto Fund, L.P. - Q2 2004 Letter
Dear Partners and Friends,
Closing Kuroto Fund to New Investors: 1 October 2004
After the scheduled opening on 1 October 2004, Kuroto fund will no longer accept capital from new investors. This action reflects our long-stated intention of profiting from superior performance rather than asset gathering.
Over the past few years, Kuroto has grown its assets several fold, and at the current $123MM in partners’ capital, the fund is fast approaching optimal size. Closing the fund at this time may seem premature to some, especially as there is no scarcity of cheap stocks in Asia. But, as the Charlie Munger quote atop this page makes clear, we are not just looking for cheap stocks. We continue to insist on only investing in exceptional businesses with superior managements that trade at deep discounts to intrinsic value.
In the past our intention has been to limit the fund to 20-30 meaningful positions. With our enlarged research staff -- four analysts -- we have been generating a growing number of attractive new investment ideas in the sub $500MM market capitalization range. To take full advantage of these ideas, Kuroto will increase the number of long positions in its portfolio. Our goal, going forward, is to own 30-40 core positions.
Indonesia’s Banks
The Indonesian banking crisis of the late 1990s is one of the worst on record. In its wake, the government of Indonesia was forced to undertake the Herculean task of nationalizing and then re-privatizing a huge swath of corporate Indonesia. Key to the success of this effort was the recapitalization of the country’s banks. While the process was never pretty, it did create a well-capitalized and liquid banking system capable of strong growth in the years to come.
Well managed financially sound banks are not the normal outcome of financial system failures. More often than not, banks emerge from a crisis weakened and over-levered. To explain why requires a brief digression into the usual progression of banking crises.
Banks’ leveraged balance sheets leave little room for error. The loss of even a small percentage of bank assets can put a banking system in a precarious position; the loss of a larger percent of assets can set in motion a banking system crisis. Acutely aware of their inability to absorb sizable losses, banks often seek to conceal these losses rather than make public their impaired financial condition. Interestingly, governments often assist banks in this obfuscation. By allowing banks to understate the damage done to their balance sheets, governments hope to avoid calls for a costly banking system bailout.
When no amount of optimistic accounting can preserve bank solvency, governments find themselves forced to formally intervene to prevent a collapse. At this point, governments almost always want to “fix” the problem while spending as little money as possible, as the funds expended are often viewed by the public as a taxpayer bailout of the bankers. Regrettably, a solution that understates the true extent of the damage invariably produces a structurally undercapitalized banking system. The resulting banks are, in turn, prone to cutting back on lending and widening interest margins as a means of completing the unfinished recapitalization process.
So why did Indonesia’s bank recapitalization succeed where so many other recapitalization programs have come up short? Simply put, Indonesia’s banking collapse was so severe that there was little opportunity to sugar-coat the truth. The Indonesian government had no choice but to socialize the losses and nationalize the banking system. Moreover, the controlling shareholders of the failing banks were so obviously corrupt so as to make their departure a precondition of any sensible solution.
The recent privatization of these recapitalized Indonesian banks has provided Kuroto with several exceptional investment opportunities. We have chosen to focus our fund’s investment in this sector on two exceptionally strong retail franchises, each of which has many years of rapid, highly profitable growth ahead.
Sincerely,
Sean Fieler
William W. Strong










