Archive for 2012

As Exxon Mobil Weighs Oil Bid, Afghans Move Closer To A Foreign Investment Goal

Via The New York Times, a report on the latest battle of global and regional bulls over Afghanistan’s potential oil and gas riches. The country’s Ministry of Mines recently announced eight finalists to bid for an estimated 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent in northern Afghanistan.  ExxonMobil has been pitted against companies from bitter regional […]

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Complexities of Future Energy Investment in Libya

Courtesy of STRATFOR (subscription required), some very interesting analysis of what Libya’s upcoming elections may mean for international investors: Libya’s citizens will head to the polls July 7 in the first national elections since the October 2011 ousting of former leader Moammar Gadhafi. The upcoming election will select a prime minister, Cabinet and a constituent authority that […]

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Can Mongolia Avoid Nigeria’s Mistakes?

Via The Globe and Mail, an article examining Mongolia’s commodity boom: In much of the developing world, natural resources seem to offer a handy way out of poverty. But they also present a curse. Mongolia, where the centre-right Democratic Party led last week’s elections on a wave of resource nationalism, would be wise to avoid […]

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Africa’s True Mobile Revolution: Yet to Start

Via the Harvard Business Review, an interesting commentary on the potential for mobile-enabled growth in Africa: The United States economy is nine times the size of Africa’s, but Africa has twice as many mobile phones. This tantalizing statistic would seem to indicate that, in the mobile era, Africa’s time has come. But the mobile subscriber […]

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Angola State Oil Group Plans Production Increase

Courtesy of The Financial Times, a report that Sonangol, the Angolan state oil group that has amassed assets from Iraq to Cuba, is aiming to raise fivefold its production as an operator.  As the article notes: “…Manuel Vicente, whose promotion to minister of state for economic co-ordination in January ended his 12 years at the […]

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Foreign Investors Getting Nervous About Argentina … Again

Two articles of interest on Argentina.  The first, via Foreign Policy, looks at investor worries emanating from recent policy shifts: Argentina is once again rattling the nerves of foreign investors. The country that has been struggling to move on after its 2001 default and checkered economic history has recently nationalized the country’s largest private company, […]

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ABOUT
WILDCATS AND BLACK SHEEP
Wildcats & Black Sheep is a personal interest blog dedicated to the identification and evaluation of maverick investment opportunities arising in frontier - and, what some may consider to be, “rogue” or “black sheep” - markets around the world.

Focusing primarily on The New Seven Sisters - the largely state owned petroleum companies from the emerging world that have become key players in the oil & gas industry as identified by Carola Hoyos, Chief Energy Correspondent for The Financial Times - but spanning other nascent opportunities around the globe that may hold potential in the years ahead, Wildcats & Black Sheep is a place for the adventurous to contemplate & evaluate the emerging markets of tomorrow.