Even though Florianopolis is surrounded by the airports of Porto Alegre, Joinville and Curitiba, it is one of the fastest growing airports of Brazil. In 2007 it received 1,9 million passengers and from January – June 2009, it received 1.045.086 passengers.
The airport started operating in 1922 and the current terminal of 8.440 m2 was scaled to cater for 980.000 passangers a year; today it is handling double of that amount.

As a comparison: Port Elzibath in South Africa handled 760.282 passengers in 2008, George handled 336.603 passengers.

The plans for expanding Florianopolis airport date from 2004 and would bring it’s capacity to 2,7 million yearly passengers.
The passengers terminal would be expanded from 8.440 m2 to 33.800 m2.
The check-in counters would be expanded to 36.
The parking space for planes would be expanded form 20.187 m2 to 141.700 m2.
4 embarcation bridges would be build
Parking space would be expanded from 500 to 1.850 places.

Finally, after some political pressure, it seems that the project would now kickstart and would be finalized by 2012; I’ll make that 2013, just in time for the World Soccer.  By 2010, the road to the airport will be duplicated, the project has been signed off by the municipality.

The airport is extremely convenient, with GOL you are a 3h, 150 € flight away from Buenos Aires and with TAM or Oceanair you fly in 1h10 minutes for 50 – 100 € (depending if you get a promo) into Conhonas in the heart of Sao Paulo.

Some pictures of the expansion project:

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Tags: Expansion Florianopolis airport, Hercilio Luz

In 2008, MPX announced the plans for a new Ocean Port for Rio de Janeiro: Porto do Açu.
Strong believing in the prospects of logistic players in Brazil, why bought MPX at 6,95 R$ mid January; today they are trading at 17,85 R$, that is a 156% profit.    We believe the stock has the potential to go above 40 R$ by mid 2010.

Port Açu will start operations in 2010.  It is located 280 km Northeastfrom Rio, just up from Macae and will be serving Rio, Minas Gerais, Espirito Santo and the oil rigs of the Macae area.

The Port, located approximately 280 km northeast of Rio, is under construction and should be completed by the end of 2011.

On July3d, the Governor of Rio de Janeiro State,  announced that the Chinese company WISCO will construct a steel mill at Porto do Açu in partnership with Grupo EBX investments.  The project will create 20.000 jobs.  Grupo EBX is of Brazil’s richest man Eike Batista.

A few days later, China’s JAC Motors confirmed that they will build a vehicle plant in Brazil, also in the new Porto do Açu. The link with the steel mill of WISCO is clear. JAC Motors is China’s leading bus chassis manufacturer. It produces 450,000 vehicles a year including light trucks and multipurpose vehicles.

We’ll keep a close eye on the developments there.

This week’s Business Week features an article on the expanding Brazilian middle class.

Some quotes:
Just as important, though, is Brazil’s huge domestic market. While outsiders focus on the country’s shipments of iron ore, steel, and soy to China, exports are just 12% of Brazil’s $1.5 trillion economy. It’s the 190 million people and the fast-growing middle class—now more than half the population—that drive growth.
The country’s improving prospects create huge opportunities for entrepreneurs small and large. “Brazil has had so many crises over the years, people got used to them,” says David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue, who last December started a low-cost Brazilian airline called Azul (Portuguese for “blue”). “I don’t think they’re at all fazed by this crisis—everyone seems to be focused on buying their first car, getting their first credit card.
A beauty salon in Rio de Janeiro highlights the new middle-class buying power. Despite its location in the posh Ipanema neighborhood, the clientele is mostly housemaids, hospital clerks, and other women from relatively modest circumstances. The salon is the creation of Heloisa Assis, known as Zica. One of 13 children, she grew up in a slum supported by her laundress mother. Like many Brazilians of African descent, she had brittle, kinky hair that she says hobbled her chances of getting a decent job. Zica tested homemade potions to tame her unruly Afro and finally came up with a formula that created flowing ringlets. She patented her discovery and in 1993 opened a salon, calling it Beleza Natural, or “Natural Beauty.” She soon had customers lining up at 5 a.m.
That revived auto sales, which in June hit 300,000 vehicles—an all-time high. Even hapless General Motors is enjoying fat times in Brazil, where it’s investing $1 billion through 2012 to develop a new small car. Whirlpool, which has a 40% share of Brazil’s appliance market, has benefited, too. Sales jumped 20% in May and June compared with a year earlier.

If you really want to understand the Brazilian middle class, you should visit with your wife one of the Beleza Natural beauty salons and talk with some women there, ask them about their job, what they earn, what their earning growth was the last years, how they see the Brazilian economy evolving,…

We wrote previously on the Brazilian middle class, but the below graph of Business Week summarizes it best: today, more than 51% of the Brazilian families earn between 616 and 2.579 US$ monthly, consider that Brazil counts 191.200.000 habitants and that the vast majority of the middle class is geographically concentraded in the zone Belo Horizonte -  Rio de Janeiro – Curitiba – Porto Alegre, Sao Paulo and you realize what a massive buying power this represents.

The article refers to Whirlpool in Brazil (Brazilian brand name: Brastemp), which has a 40% share of Brazil’s appliance market and who’s biggest manufacturing plant is in Joinville.  Sales of Whirlpool jumped 20% in May and June 2009 compared to the previous year which was already a record-breaker.

Neeleman’s Azul started flying end 2008, now has a 70% seat occupancy and expects profit for 2009.

Many people are now jumping on the MSCI Brazil (EWZ) bandwagon.  We bought in early March and yielded a 47% rise, yet we took our profit last week and converted into BRF; more on this later.

Tags: Brastemp, BRF, EWZ

Early July we already notified on Google Brazil kickstarting Google Streetview in Brazil. Several expats have written about it. A Flickr user in Belo Horizonte has now spotted the Google Fiat cars in the wild.

Brazil became at an explosive rate one of the top Internet user nations.  Twitter is big in Brazil, 15% of the Brazilian Internet users visited Twitter and Facebook is picking up fast.  Last week the Facebook founder gave a speech in Sao Paulo to hook up more users.    Yahoo launched there Meme service only in Portuguese, Apple opened several flagship stores in Sao Paulo and is in the process of launching its online store in Portuguese.  They are even opening cute mini stores in malls like this Itaim mini Apple store.

Willem Buiter published an article in the Financial Times on one of my favorite topics of debate: greenhouse gas emissions and the right of equaly pollution per capita.

Everytime someone comes up with the argument that the effects of making ethanol would be dramatics for CO2 emissions I come up with these statistics: an average Brazilian yields 20 times less CO2 emissions than the average American.  Moreover: the growth of CO2 emissions of the average America is, despite the fact that he already emits 20 times more CO2, is still 3 times as high as that of the average Brazilian.

But this whole debate gets really interesting when you scrap out the “poor factor” from Willem Buiter’s argumentation, in a mathematical way.
How to do that?  Very simpel: you look at the GDP a country produces and devide it by the total CO2 emission of that country.

If you would take the US (14.264.700 million US$ GDP and 5.902,75 million metric tons CO2) as an index 100, you get the following indexes for:

France: 35 (almost 3 times more efficient that the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
China: 330 (more than 3 times less efficient than the US in making 1US$ GDP, CO2-wise)
South Africa: 385 (peforms even worse than the China in making 1 US$ GDP, CO2 wise; this is due to the massive consumption of coal in SA for their electricity)
India: 226 (twice as inefficient as the US in producing 1 US$ GDP CO2 wise)

Brazil scores 57, this puts the country in the class of a developing country like France as to being competitive in creating 1U$ GDP with as little CO2 emission as possible.

Conclusion: Brazil’s low score in emission per capita is much better than India’s low score per capita.   Becausse Brazil succeeds creating 1US$ GDP with almost 400% less CO2 emissions than eg. China.