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As regular listeners will know, one of Karen's favorite materials is sandalwood, that's why she's genuinely excited to welcome Sophie and Vanessa from Quintis on the show this week. Certain varieties of sandalwood become endangered over the years, so, 30 years ago, Quintis decided to create new plantations so that sandalwood could thrive. In this interview with Karen, the ladies talk about all things sandalwood from the therapeutic benefits, the growing and harvesting procedures and why, with the right approach, sandalwood will never be endangered again. KEY TAKEAWAYS As well as producing an incredible scent, sandalwood also has some amazing therapeutic benefits, such as anti-aging. Vanessa breaks down these benefits and the research behind them. Vanessa outlines the history of sandalwood, its importance as an export for Australia and why, 30 years ago, Quintis decided to create plantations which, today, total over 4 million trees. Sophie discusses the importance of having strong relationships with the team that grow and harvest the sandalwood and how this creates transparency and trust with their clients. Sandalwood was once endangered and Quintis are determined to make sure that never happens again. Sophie discusses the company's approach to making sure that sandalwood will be sustainable for the future. BEST MOMENTS “Sandalwood has the same effect on the brain as meditation. It has the ability to calm you and reduce anxiety.” “You have to make sure you are honest with your clients so they can be honest with their customers.” “Sandalwood has an incredible ability to adapt to the other ingredients it blends with to give a wide range of scents.” EPISODE LINKS Quintis Website Quintis Instagram VALUABLE RESOURCES Getting Started Guide Artisan Perfumery Mastermind ABOUT THE HOST Fragrance expert, author, teacher and speaker; Karen Gilbert runs courses in the UK and online which demystify the secretive world of perfumery in a fun and interactive way. Karen has inspired thousands of students to explore their olfactory sense and create their own personalised fragrances. With extensive product development experience in both the commercial perfumery and the organic skincare industry, Karen is able to offer a unique insight into creating natural and mixed media fragrances for fine fragrance, room scents and skincare/bodycare products using commercial perfumery techniques. Karen is also a certified meditation teacher and has a passion for helping people to create daily rituals that integrate scent with other modalities to shift state and increase your sense of wellbeing. CONTACT DETAILS Website Instagram Facebook YouTube Email
Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss the federal budget's mining support, Santos and Quintis job cuts, live sheep exports, property development approvals, NWQ Capital Management, and Clough.
Justin Fris speaks to Nadia Budihardjo about Matt Fulton, the acting chief executive of the WA Institute of Sport. Plus: Clough's healthcare plan; Quintis job cuts; and Bunbury hospital.
Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss changes at BGC, APM and Austal ownership, Quintis in receivership, and home market data.
Mark Beyer and Jack McGinn discuss BAE Systems' significant investment in Kardinya based Innovaero. Plus: Fortescue backs Oakajee; Quintis on the market, and BGC leadership change.
Sandalwood company Quintis falls into receivership. Water allocation plan for Mataranka open for public comment.
Quintis, the world's largest Indian sandalwood company, is set to wind up all of its Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) projects in Kununurra's Ord Valley, in a bid to avoid further investment losses.
The world's largest Indian sandalwood company has announced it will wind up all of its Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) projects in northern Australia.
Eten is niet alleen lekker, het is ook nog leuk! En dat weet ook presentator en acteur Quintis Ristie (ja, van die reclames) die voor OPEN Rotterdam QR Code maakt over de verschillende keukens die onze wereld rijk is. Nu kan Ruben van Haften alleen met hem in gesprek, maar Quintis zou Quintis niet zijn als hij niet ook heerlijk eten heeft meegenomen.
A remote NT island is trialling edible seaweed. Indian sandalwood company Quintis sells property.
Senior editor Mark Pownall reflects on his latest visit to Rottnest Island. Plus the latest on Woodside Energy, the Australian Nursing Federation and Quintis.
Indian sandalwood producer Quintis puts Mataranka property up for sale. MLA funding purchase of 600,000 foot-and-mouth disease vaccines for Indonesia.
Biosecurity, banana freckle and barramundi licences all raised in NT Estimates. Quintis begins planting more sandalwood.
Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss interest rates, convention centre deal, Crown takeover, Quintis comeback, Asian engagement, charities and philanthropy.
Our hosts Trevor Groome and Aidan Kirkwood speak with world renowned flavourist John Wright. John started life as a chemist but soon realized that creating flavors was much more fun. Over the years John has worked for Duckworth (now Kerry), PFW (now Givaudan), BBA and IFF. After he escaped corporate life, he started as a consultant in 2008. His work experience covers most categories of flavor creation and most consumer product categories. John ran the Flavor Division of BBA in the U.K. until 1994, BBA Global R&D from 1995 to 2000 and IFF Global Flavor Creation and Applications from 2000 to 2007. John lived in the U.K. and Canada before finally settling in New Jersey for the past twenty five years. John has also spent significant interludes working in Chennai, Singapore, Melbourne and Koeln. As a consultant he have worked with many diverse companies, including Synthite in Kerala, Mondelez in East Hanover, Wacker in Munich and Quintis in Perth. Apart from making flavors, his hobbies include wine, writing, cooking, astronomy, swimming, music, skiing and photography. John's favourite spots in this entirely fascinating world are Roquebrune-sur-Argens, Far Sawrey, Marlborough, Breckenridge, Kerala and, last but not least, Grace Bay in the Turks and Caicos islands. John is ridiculously proud of his three children – John, William and Emma. John is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, a Member of the Society of Flavor Chemists, Inc., a Fellow of the British Society of Flavourists and a member of the MIT Innovation Lab. © 2022 British Society of Flavourists Music by Aidan Kirkwood
Mark Pownall and Mark Beyer discuss Dexus buying Jandakot, Raleigh Finlayson, Sandfire Resources, Quintis, Dallas Dempster, John Elliott, APM, iron ore and RemSense IPO.
Today’s guest is Soren Aandahl, founder and chief investment officer at Blue Orca Capital, based in Austin, Texas. Soren is a short activist investor who specializes in deep dive due diligence. He’s a recognized star in the short activist universe and was previously CIO at Glaucus Investments, which was named the 2016 Short Activist of the Year by Activist Insight Magazine. He’s incredibly thoughtful about his craft as an investor and his passion for short activism shined through in our conversation. We talked about the colorful tale of Quintis, a one-time high-flying Australian company that his research revealed to be largely worthless. If you would like notes from today’s episode, please subscribe to our free newsletter. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did and feel free to email info@investingindepth.com with feedback. You can follow Blue Orca Capital on their web site and Twitter. 2:10 Soren’s journey to becoming an investor: An aspiring federal prosecutor turned activist short seller. 4:29 Quintis is an Australia-based manager of commercial Indian sandalwood plantations. Their business requires planting trees and cultivating them for 15-20 years before harvesting and generating cash. 6:28 Quintis hit Soren’s radar screen after they sued a sell side analyst who had written a private note to his clients advising them not to invest in the company. “As a general rule, as a short seller, you look in the world and you say that great companies don’t really care if you criticize them. They know that in the long run that they’re right. It just kind of brushes off their shoulder. But companies with something to hide get incredibly prickly and defensive when you criticize them or when anyone says something that contradicts their world view…. Our spider senses just went up right away and we said these guys have something to hide.” 8:42 Digging into a potential short selling opportunity: unpacking disclosures and financial statements. Red flags included deploying an unusual financial structure for fundraising, non-cash profits based on revaluations of assets, and a high amount of debt (i.e., almost half of EBITDA went to servicing debt each year). 13:42 The first big break: Comparing financials against what Quintis marketing materials told investors. Quintis was promising investors dividends after two years and full payback after seven years even though their trees 15-20 years to mature and generate revenue. “That immediately jumped out to us as like a hallmark of Ponzi-like behavior.” Fun fact: Ponzi schemes are named after Charles Ponzi, a 1920s-era swindler based in Boston whose history Mitchel Zuckoff details in the book Ponzi’s Scheme. 17:17 An analogy to Enron where “The problem wasn’t necessarily the mark to market accounting, it was the abuse of the market to market accounting…. what Jim Chanos called mark to model accounting…. Enron’s scam was taking incredibly difficult to value assets for which there was not only no determinable spot price but they took 15-20 years to come to fruition, recognizing the revenue upfront but also revaluing those assets every year to get non-cash profits.” Quintis likewise was generating non-cash paper profits based on increases in the value of its maturing sandalwood trees where it had wide discretion in the value that it attributed to these assets. 20:50 The “detective moment.” Quintis set the value that it attributed to its assets by relying on price projections from a broker who was an undisclosed stock promoter for their company. 24:56 Soren’s investing superpower: “There is no substitute for doing the hard work and doing the grind…. The best short ideas are the ones that in retrospect look so obvious…. You earn the luck of finding that… by grinding through the filings and the footnotes and chasing down 30 leads before the 31st one is your eureka moment.” 26:21 Discovering that Quintis bid up prices for sandalwood at occasional auctions, which had the effect of bolstering the value that it could attribute to its sandalwood tree assets. 30:20 “The final element”: tracking down the primary customer that Quintis claimed as generating over half of its sales and learning that they appeared to be largely a fake company. 38:50 A primer on how short selling works. “You’re selling the stock today with the hope that you will buy it back later at a lower price because it will decline…. you don’t have the shares, you receive the cash [for selling the shares], but you need to pay interest because you need to borrow them from someone who has the shares.... In shorting you call that negative rebate. Think of it as the interest rate that you pay to borrow the shares while you have your position…. The interest rate fluctuates wildly and there’s no real centralized market for the borrow fee… it’s set by the brokers…. The hard part about shorting is that while your position is on, you are paying the interest to borrow the shares and so that’s going to eat into your eventual economic profits should you generate any.” 41:00 How Soren thought about taking a public activist position. 53:08 Considerations when sizing short position: borrow availability and short interest as a percentage of float (i.e., whether it is a “crowded” short). 54:14 Exiting the short. “Oftentimes as investors, the easier decision is ‘I know this is the time to enter into this investment’ and… the much harder decision is ‘when do I exit.’” 55:38 Recommended reading The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean on the Enron scandal. “There really is nothing different… a lot of the things we’ve seen, especially in the markets, we’ve seen before” and this classic provides insight not only on how “these schemes work, but how they’re perpetuated and how they convince so many people” Muddy Waters Research posts by Carson Block (web and Twitter) Wolfpack Research posts by Dan David (web and Twitter) No Mercy / No Malice newsletter by Scott Galloway Economist for breadth and “expanding your touchpoints into areas you wouldn’t have even considered” Soren was humble in not mentioning his own short reports, but there are dozens available on Blue Orca’s web site and they make for terrific reading. The Quintis report is here. Note: This podcast is for educational purposes only and nothing here constitutes a recommendation or offer.
This week's guest on The Rules of Investing (ROI) is Ben McGarry, founder and Portfolio Manager at Totus Capital, and an expert in short selling. Ben started his career at an accountant at PWC, allowing him to gain skills that would be invaluable later as he searched for frauds, fads, and failures on the short-side of his fund's portfolio. Tune in below to hear about the accounting tricks companies use to mask their true performance, his public short on a household name, and why it took a public short-report from Glaucus to bring attention to the issues at Quintis and Blue Sky.
In this Business News podcast Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss FMG expansion, Quintis, Cooper & Oxley, defence contracts, Immersive Technologies, and our special report on distilleries and breweries.
In this Business News podcast Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss FMG expansion, Quintis, Cooper & Oxley, defence contracts, Immersive Technologies, and our special report on distilleries and breweries.
In this Business News podcast Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss house prices – up or down? CBD office vacancies, residential building volatility, AWE bidding war, Quintis update, mining robots, Adventure World and ports and transport.
In this Business News podcast Mark Beyer and Mark Pownall discuss house prices – up or down? CBD office vacancies, residential building volatility, AWE bidding war, Quintis update, mining robots, Adventure World and ports and transport.
Is there reason to cheer when one of Australia's biggest shorts wins out? James and Alan discuss the washup of the Quintis saga, the outlook for local currencies, pricing Australian retail outlets and much more on this week's episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this Business News podcast Mark Pownall, Matt Mckenzie, and Katie McDonald discuss the Quintis collapse, Wheatstone’s environmental conditions, Doric’s Chinese joint venture, wage gap battle, Fringe festival and land developers.
In this Business News podcast Mark Pownall, Matt Mckenzie, and Katie McDonald discuss the Quintis collapse, Wheatstone’s environmental conditions, Doric’s Chinese joint venture, wage gap battle, Fringe festival and land developers.
In this Business News podcast Mark Pownall and Mark Beyer discuss FMG's native title stoush, trucking sector restructuring, Quintis drama, economic update, honey, and the onshore oil and gas sector.
In this Business News podcast Mark Pownall and Mark Beyer discuss FMG's native title stoush, trucking sector restructuring, Quintis drama, economic update, honey, and the onshore oil and gas sector.
In this Business News podcast, Mark Pownall and Mark Beyer discuss residential property, Quintis, insolvency law reform and oil and gas.
In this Business News podcast, Mark Pownall and Mark Beyer discuss residential property, Quintis, insolvency law reform and oil and gas.