Apollo Asia Fund Q2 Report: The imprecision of vital statistics

There has been much recent discussion of Chinese statistics, but I have seen none at all on an interesting revision to BP's data on Malaysian oil production and consumption. BP's annual 'Statistical Review of World Energy' has become a principal source of information on primary energy trends: the latest version may be found at www.bp.com. The Energy Export Databrowser provides helpful charts based on this data.

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Energy policy in Indonesia is certainly no more coherent than in Malaysia, but the musings of ministers do at least range more broadly, which may perhaps allow hope for change. Indonesia, Malaysia and India suffer from the distortions and misallocations caused by energy subsidies: reforming these would be a good place to start.

While we consider energy issues extremely important for the next few decades, the timescale on which they play out can be awkward for investors. We added only one new name to the portfolio in the second quarter, and that had no relation to energy; we trimmed and added, but made no dramatic changes. Japan still seems to offer unusual value, and our allocation there has increased slightly.