@JID
John, thanks for the detailed posts, appreciate the effort. Sorry to be a pain and devils advocate but have a few more Qs (though if you don't answer will understand).
Do you have a rough idea of what the break even price is for the sandalwood (and how sensitive this is to input costs such as water, costs of finance etc) and the ROI for eg a hectare of trees?
As you know with eg gold-mining companies etc until they started reporting AISC instead of cash costs, there are many examples of companies losing money reporting a profit.
I can see that the investment may be worthwhile irrespective of this is TFC increase the market and develop the end uses effectively to get pricing power, but in the bear case I want to if the industry as a whole is sustainable under this model as a price-taker. In the long term they definitely have first mover advantage, but I don't know how many untapped sandalwood forests there are in the world, and if new supply comes on it could be a problem. The sort of supply that requires no long-lead investments in particular will be much cheaper to harvest than TFCs model, which is definitely more sustainable and environmentally friendly.
