Mining will keep economy growing Need to increase production Prices may fall but demand will be strong

 

THE mining boom will help keep Australia’s economy from falling into a hole until at least 2013, a report suggests.

Economic forecaster BIS Shrapnel said record levels of mining investment together with a ramp-up in production will insulate the economy from recession for the next five years - even with commodity prices tipped to fall.

“We didn’t really do enough investment, with the benefit of hindsight, through the 1990s to gear ourselves up for maintaining strong growth in mineral output and what we’re trying to do now is catch up,” said Adrian Hart, senior manager of BIS Shrapnel’s mining unit.

“The next five years will all be about increasing production to meet demand from China and other emerging economies . . . and once that production comes on stream that will drive weaker prices for a lot of commodities.”

The

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Seven Arts Pictures (SAPXF.OB), an independent producer and distributor of feature-length, high-quality, low-cost films, recently announced revenues of more than $10 million in 2007 and profits of $2.2 million. The company anticipates revenues to exceed $15 million in 2008 and expects profits for drama, adventure and horror-comedy entertainment to post a significant increase in the months ahead.

The company’s core business strategy is to finance, produce and distribute four to seven films per year with budgets of less than $10 million each and with built-in margins based on pre-sales of 30 to 50 percent. When combined with careful construction of the film’s director, actors, producer and writer, the company creates a valuable long-term asset as a library title. Seven Arts Pictures business model is not based on blockbuster receipts from first-run theatrical release, but instead on pre-sales of DVD and pay-per-view, along with pay and free television rights worldwide.

Seven Arts

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It looks like a few more institutions have caught on to my thesis of farmland as fantastic investment opportunity, which I began proposing this winter [Jun 5: NYTimes: Farmland is Gold, So Billions Invested in Farming]. This is a sea change - hard assets having more value than stupid "financial innovations" of a debt laden, credit based society. We're going old school.If I had a way to buy futures contracts on farmland I'd be buying that too. And yes I am very serious. I think values for farmland across the world are going to rocket in the next decade.The way things are going, within a decade farmland is going to have more value than ocean front property.I've said in the past if there was an easy instrument to purchase farmland, I'd like to be in it. Even more ...

Shutterfly Inc., founded in 1999, is an Internet-based social expression and personal publishing service. Trading on NASDAQ as part of the Consumer Services industry, they provide high quality products and services that make it easy and enjoyable for customers to preserve their digital photos. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the company allows customers to organize all their photos in a single, safe, easily accessible location.

With their photos uploaded onto the Shutterfly site, customers can produce photo-based communications and gifts. It’s a way for consumers to produce products that allow them to send personalized gifts to family and friends. Shutterfly Inc.’s popular line is their Photo Books. With these, their customers can preserve and celebrate memories by telling their own stories with photos and text. Shutterfly combines these into a professional bound coffee table book.

Shutterfly has over 1.5 billion images stored in their digital archive. They foresee greater growth in their

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Last Mile Logistics Group has been delivering to the Mid-Atlantic market for several years. Through its subsidiary, Chesapeake Logistics, the company handles the “last mile” of courier service for numerous types of clientele. Last Mile Logistics has a long list of high-profile companies for which it has delivered, including Pier 1 Imports, JCPenney, and Ticketmaster, just to name a few.

Last Mile is the subject of a recent Beacon Equity Research report, in which it received a ‘Speculative Buy’ rating, and a target price of $0.32 from analyst Lisa Springer, CFA. The report states: “We think LMLG warrants a valuation at the high end of the peer group range because of its significant new customer wins, competitive differentiation and above average growth … We also anticipate consistent gross margins gains resulting from greater efficiencies and economies of scale. We expect the Company’s gross margins to improve to a 42 percent

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My latest column is up at RealMoney.

I think Rent-A-Center (RCII) can benefit from the slowdown in consumer spending and the tightening of credit standards.

If Rent-A-Center were to receive the same price-to-book multiple as Aaron Rents, it could trade above $28 per share today. While I don’t believe that will happen overnight, over the next five years Rent-A-Center could see high-single-digit earnings per share growth and also expand its price-to-book multiple to the 1.9 level. The combination of earnings growth and valuation expansion could generate annual returns averaging 15% or more.

Here’s how the company scores on the Stock Market Beat models:

Earnings momentum: Positive Earnings quality: Positive Price momentum: Neutral Free cash flow: Positive Return potential: Positive

Disclosure: At time of publication, William Trent has no financial position in the companies mentioned in this article.

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