Hi Saikat. Thanks for your compliments.CCC is openingly offering...

Hi Saikat. Thanks for your compliments.

CCC is openingly offering to sell as stake in their SA business CCL. I wouldn't call that access to finance though although access to cash I guess. Its just selling their business though. If they can sell it for a price that implies a much higher share price for CCC, then it will be positive. It would also solve the hold co funding problems if it was anything like the money your talking. I think that is highly unlikely though. They have talked up the possibilty but at the same time effectively sold more shares and put in place what I think is large discounted share placement facilty. There's not way they could sell below 50% without it being a purely distressed sale. So 24% available. Does someone really want to buy a minority stake in CCC? Of course they could sell the lot but I don't think that's on the cards.

A recent and relevant example was the Chinese buying into Coal of Africa. However, that is to get access to Coking coal. I would argue, and others too I'd say, that Coal of Africa trades with a negative value attributed to its thermal assets. The only time South African thermal coal has seemed a good business is in the communications of CCC managment! In fact, eventually even they started admitting they needed to move to coking coal.

Perhaps someone will place a value on CCC's SA thermal assets despite current lack of profitabilty. However to talk hundreds of millions I think is a bit crazy. And you certainly need to get into the 100s to start thinking about any value to CCC shareholders net of operating and hold co liabilities. I'm away at the moment. Will look in a bit more detail at CCC valuation some time.

While I'm posting, I much comment on one of your previous posts. It was sort of an abstract academic comment I guess but to suggest that CCC's sharemarket demise has some social value is very far fetched to me. Its quite the opposite in fact and glaringly so. They sold an implausible story to 10,000 small investors. A lot of the money went on corp overheads and things like royalties and consultancy fees paid to unidentified parties. Its hard to underestimate the impact that has on access to finance for projects in emerging markets and particularly in South Africa.