Joe Studwell

And it's a sort of a slow build.

It's not helped by the fact that African governments don't recognize that manufacturing is something that you just cannot develop quickly without because it's massively the most efficient way to take your rural population into the modern economy.

There's just no kind of...

There's no sort of political commitment really to manufacturing in Africa, although the African Union has tried to ferment one.

But nonetheless, manufacturing is going on.

And when you go and visit manufacturing hubs, manufacturing enclaves in Africa, each of the ones.

So, you know, I went to Lesotho, to Madagascar, to Morocco.

And in each of these places, you just think, well, there's no real reason why there can't be a lot more of this here.

Yeah.

because the labor is, it starts off massively less productive than in China, but it goes up a fairly steep curve.

And in one to two years, people running factories generally are happy with the productivity that they're getting.

I mean, if we're talking in a very geographically specific way about Southeast Asia and we're thinking about countries like Indonesia and the Philippines, then I think that Africa will be more like that than it will like the Northeast Asian countries with the sort of super competent governments in Japan and Korea and China.

and today Vietnam.

So I think it will be more like traditional Southeast Asia.

And you can already see certain things.

So going back to the businesses that I was talking about that have come out of agriculture, the agricultural manufacturers and processors, you can already see them evolving in the way that a company like CP Group did in Thailand or Salem Group did in Indonesia.

that they get these cash flows, very good cash flows out of agricultural processing.

I mean, Salim was making noodles, CP was doing seeds.

And then they take that money and they build these kind of Christmas tree conglomerates.

And you can see this happening already in Africa.