Maciej Wojtal (Should you invest in Iranian equities?)

• 00:00:20 How Maciej got started with Amtelon Capital and why he chose Iran as a primary investment target?
• 00:05:33 Why is Iran like Russia (and Eastern Europe ) in the 1990s? Is there a catalyst for Iran making it back to be connected with the rest of the world?
• 00:14:25 A short story of sanctions against Iran.
• 00:26:06 How Iranians and the regime in Iran differ? Why is the regime so successful in controlling power?
• 00:32:32 What are great businesses to invest in Iran?
• 00:48:11 How Iran avoided the 'Dutch disease' of big commodity exporters.
• 00:56:08 Is Iran starting to be a new part of an 'Axis power'? Will this hamper the participation of outside investors in the Iranian market?

Maciej Wojtal is the founder and CIO of Amtelon Capital which is focused on investing in Iranian equities. Maciej has worked with Citigroup and JP Morgan before running his own fund.

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Torsten Jacobi: Maciej, welcome to the Podcast. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate that.

Maciej Wojtal: Yes, thank you for having me here.

Torsten Jacobi: Hey, absolutely. You run something really interesting and you are the cofounder and the CIO of Amtalan Capital, which really focuses on investing primarily in equities in Iran, from what I understand. That sounds really cool, really unique. I have never heard about an investment fund out there that actually invests in Iran. How did that happen? How did you get started on why Iran? Why not something that's a little more politically correct, so to speak?

Maciej Wojtal: Yes, well, it is super exciting. And when I speak to the local regulator in Iran, they tell us that we are their favorite foreign investor, foreign institutional investor, because we are the only one. There is really no other foreign institutional investor in Iran, so we are the only ones. So I decided to launch Amtalan Capital back in 2016, when JCPOA, the nuclear agreement, was implemented. And the reason why Iran and not something else was actually pretty simple. There was no other market. There's still there is still no other market at this moment in the world with lower evaluations, a higher growth potential, both like a long term structural growth potential, as well as near term growth that will be coming from the reopening of the country or reintegration of the country with the rest of the world. And to be honest, this is potentially the last opportunity of this size. So the type of opportunity, I mean, is a transformational opportunity. So country going from one situation, because it's not from one system to another, I don't expect any political, you know, revolution or transformation there. But the economic situation will change, will change from a, you know, decades of sanctions, where the economy was basically cut off from the rest of the world to the economy that is slowly opening up, catching up with the rest of emerging markets, with everything good that happened in the rest of the emerging markets over the last two decades. And on top of that, no one is there. So Americans cannot touch it. So all the big funds out there have to wait until the primary US sanctions are lifted. So suddenly you get, you get to go to a new market like this of this size and invest before the big US funds go there. It doesn't happen too often. And what I mean of this size, what I mean by this size is, you know, that's another unique thing is that you may have some frontier markets that you can get excited about because of demographics, you know, growth potential, whatever. But usually they have no capital markets. You can go and launch startups, build a factory, a bank, whatever. And here you already have prett