As recently reported in the Investors Business Daily, there is a race among various cellular phone operators to grab assets in still-developing markets where wireless penetration is still well below 30%, and in some cases 10%, in many parts of Africa, southeast Asia, central Asia and other remote areas of the globe. As the article […]
Read more »Via Stratfor (subscription required), an excellent analysis of how the balance of power between China, Russia and the United States will change now that ground has been broken on the final portion of a pipeline linking the massive energy reserves of the Caspian Sea directly to China (namely the pipeline connecting the Kazakh cities of […]
Read more »As reported in The Financial Times, Iran signed a $2bn oil contract with Sinopec of China, sending a signal to western companies that they might miss out on potentially lucrative contracts with one of the world’s biggest energy exporters if they continued to heed US-led sanctions against Tehran. As the article notes: “…The contract to […]
Read more »Via TerraDaily, an article on China’s active engagement of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a troubled nation with huge but largely untapped natural resources such as 34 percent of the world’s known cobalt reserves, 10 percent of its copper, vast forests full of timber and a treasure trove of gold and diamonds. This is just […]
Read more »From Eurasianet.org, a terrific look at Turkmenistan’s delicate balance of making promises to various regional hydrocarbon players, all without the benefit of a published, independent audit of the nation’s petroleum reserves. As the article notes: “…Turkmenistan is believed to be one of the top five nations in the world, in terms of natural gas reserves. […]
Read more »As noted in the Eurasia Daily Monitor, Kazakhstan – despite its efforts to symbolically broaden its foreign policy with recent Presidential visits to places such as Syria, UAE, and the Balkans – and investments such as KazMunayGaz’s recent acquisition of a 75% stake in Romania’s Rompetrol Group, the Balkan pipeline route and East European markets […]
Read more »