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Archive for the ‘Board Of Intellectual Capital’ Category

Is the U.S. Market Again Ripe for IPOs?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Investments, Market research, Social Networks, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an intresting article from Money morning.

“Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s (NYSE: GS) initial public offerings (IPO) guru Tom Tuft has joined Bruce Wasserstein’s Lazard Ltd. (NYSE: LAZ) as chairman of Global Capital Markets Advisory and vice-chairman of its U.S. investment banking, in what could be a sign that the market for IPOs is thawing.

Tuft, a 33-year Goldman vet who co-founded its equity capital markets business in 1985 and became its chairman in 2004, was involved in several high-profile IPOs, including those of The Estee Lauder Companies Inc. (NYSE: EL) and RJR Nabisco Inc. He also advised Lazard on its own IPO in 2005.

A slowdown in mergers and acquisitions has prompted Lazard to expand its equity capital markets and restructuring operations, working on nine of the top 10 bankruptcies this year, Bloomberg News reported. Capital raised by IPOs in the first half of this year was $11.4 billion, down 85% from the same period last year according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“There is demand for companies to come public,” David Menlow, president of IPOFinancial.com told Bloomberg. “The fact that we haven’t seen that many is not an indication that companies are not out there ready to come public.”

The article continues.

The “Silicon Valley Six”

“An informal poll of venture capitalists and others conducted by Reuters yielded six successful companies with revenue of $100 million or more in Silicon Valley that are ripe for acquisition or an IPO, excluding social networking sensations Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. The news service dubbed the companies the “Silicon Valley Six,” which were chosen out of 34 citied in sectors ranging from alternative energy to video games.

The top four companies found were social network LinkedIn Corp., solar panel maker Solyndra Inc., smart grid company Silver Spring Networks and Zynga Inc., which develops games that run on social networks like Facebook or New Corp.’s (NYSE: NWS) MySpace.

The other two are Guidewire, which develops software for property and casualty companies, and LiveOps, which operates call centers from contractors that work from their homes.

“They are exciting because they…demonstrate what is possible with venture capital,” Sharon Wienbar, managing director of Scale Venture Partners told Reuters. “These are companies that have proven a new, attractive business model that works big in spaces.”

Venture capitalists’ rule of thumb for declaring a company ripe for an IPO is that a company must have  $100 million in sales and have a capitalization of about $1 billion in order to have enough money to meet the reporting structures of the Sarbanes-Oxley act.

“The market is in the early stages of being back,” LiveOps Chief Executive Officer Maynard Webb said. “The market is ripe and open today for great companies.”

While not mentioned in Reuters’ “Silicon Valley Six,” one private company that’s making waves in Silicon Valley is PopCap Games Inc., which publishes and develops easy-to-play, accessible “casual” video games.”

Read the full article here.

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IPO filings on the rise, Dollar General and Hyatt Hotels is next!

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is some upbeat news from BusinessWeek.

“After months of market turmoil, are investors finally ready for a slew of brand-new stocks?

The owners of some private companies think so. In early August, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts announced plans to raise about $1 billion through an initial public offering. There’s speculation that buyout giant Kohlberg Kravis Roberts is preparing retail chain Dollar General (DG) for a stock debut. Last month 12 companies filed with regulators to go public—the most since investment bank Lehman Brothers failed back in September 2008.

The conditions for IPOs have improved dramatically since the desolation of last winter. Stocks have rallied from their lows. And new companies are outperforming blue chips: The FTSE Renaissance Capital IPO Composite Index, which tracks the returns of IPOs, is up roughly 33% this year, vs. 7% for the Dow Jones industrial average. “Nobody’s pushing any dogs here,” says Gregg Slager of Ernst & Young’s private equity consulting group.

To be sure, the glory days aren’t back. The pipeline, though improving, isn’t bursting with new listings: At the peak of the boom, dozens of companies filed to go public each month. And obviously the businesses can’t raise $18 billion at a pop, as credit processor Visa (V) did with its offering in 2007. While the largest IPO of this year, Starwood Property Trust, raised the size of its offering from $500 million, it still raked in just $800 million in early August.

But the increased IPO activity may signal that the recession is easing—or at least that investors think the economy is on the mend. “There’s confidence in the market,” says Harris Smith, managing partner of private equity for Grant Thornton, a consulting firm. And “there’s pent-up demand for new, quality stocks.” After the dot-com bust, new stock offerings picked up just as the economy started to turn.

BUYOUTS RULE

Private equity owners are the most active participants in the IPO markets nowadays. Of the 16 companies that have gone public this year, 8 are backed by buyout firms. And more IPOs are in the works. “There are a couple of companies that are definitely candidates [for going public],” Tony James, chief operations officer of Blackstone (BX), said in a recent earnings call. “If the markets hold up and continue the trend, you will see some IPOs from our portfolio.””

Read the full article here.

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Successful “Date Certain M&A” of Business Unit and its Assets and Intellectual Property

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Distressed Intellectual Property, Distressed IP, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , on August 13, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Steven R. Gerbsman, Principal of Gerbsman Partners, Kenneth Hardesty, Merle McCreery and Dennis Sholl, members of Gerbsman Partners Board of Intellectual Capital, announced today their success in maximizing stakeholder value for a venture capital backed online marketing solutions company, specializing in lead generation and customer acquisition.

Gerbsman Partners provided Crisis Management leadership, facilitated the sale of the business unit, associated Intellectual Property and assets and recovered receivables. Due to market conditions, the senior lender and the board of directors made the strategic decision to maximize the value of the business unit and Intellectual Property.

Gerbsman Partners provided leadership to the company with

  • Crisis Management and technology expertise in developing the strategic action plans for maximizing value of the business unit, Intellectual Property and assets;
  • Proven domain expertise in maximizing the value of the business unit and Intellectual Property through a targeted and proprietary “Date Certain M&A Process”;
  • The ability to “Manage the Process” among potential Acquirers, Lawyers, Creditors Management and Advisors;
  • The proven ability to “Drive” toward successful closure for all parties at interest.

About Gerbsman Partners

Gerbsman Partners focuses on maximizing enterprise value for stakeholders and shareholders in under-performing, under-capitalized and under-valued companies and their Intellectual Property. Since 2001, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in maximizing value for 56 Technology, Life Science and Medical Device companies and their Intellectual Property and has restructured/terminated over $770 million of real estate executory contracts and equipment lease/sub-debt obligations. Since inception in 1980, Gerbsman Partners has been involved in over $2.2 billion of financings, restructurings and M&A transactions.

Gerbsman Partners has offices and strategic alliances in Boston, New York, Washington, DC, Alexandria, VA, San Francisco, Europe and Israel.

For additional information please visit www.gerbsmanpartners.com

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Funds, REITs Eye IPOs for Capital

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Housing market, Investments, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 11, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is an article from Globest.com in regards to possible IPO opportunities.

“LOS ANGELES-Earlier this summer, locally based Colony Financial Inc. filed a registration statement for a $500 million IPO. This organization, experts tell GlobeSt.com, is one of many REITs and opportunity funds that will tap the public markets for liquidity to buy distressed and other assets during the next 12 to 18 months.

Ernst & Young’s Howard Roth with the company’s New York City office points out the market hasn’t seen a flood of fund and REIT public offerings. Nor has Craig Silvers, who is president of Bricks & Mortar Capital, which operates on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles. But both agree that it’s coming.

“Right now, we’re seeing a raft of registrations for mortgage REITs,” Roth says. “During the past six weeks, we’ve seen close to 25 registrations. This is clearly a trend right now. And it’s clearly an avenue that sponsors believe they can take advantage of.”

“Registrations, of course, don’t necessarily mean automatic initial public offerings. Silvers points out that the opportunity funds are definitely being formed to buy distressed assets. Whether they go public or not is a different matter. But it’s becoming a viable alternative.”

In the real estate market earlier this year, a lot of private companies got into trouble,” Silvers says. “The private ones had to liquidate their assets and declare bankruptcy because they couldn’t raise private capital.” However, funds and REITs going public “can tap the public markets for cash whenever an acquisition opportunity comes up,” Silvers remarks.

Roth points out that the benefits of going public include better access to capital and stronger discipline when it comes to accounting, operations and management. Then there is the transparency issue in that investors would know what they’re getting into when they put their money in the stock.”

Read the full article here.

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So What’s the Real Unemployment Rate?

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , on August 10, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good article from The Campaign Spot.

“Hmm. In June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the civilian labor force was 154,926,000 people.

In July, 796,000 of those were taken out of their definition of the workforce, and thus their unemployment calculations for this month, because they have stopped looking for work “because they believe no jobs are available for them.” Ten percent of the June workforce would be 15.4 million, 1 percent would be 1.5 million, and so 796,000 is roughly one half of one percent.

In other words, BLS took .5 percent of what you and I would consider unemployed and took them out of their total. And with that, unemployment went down one tenth of one percent.

Of course, if you take the July number of unemployed, 14.5 million, and add that 796,000 of discouraged workers, you get a total of 15,296,000.

In a work force of July’s number of 154,504,000, that’s an unemployment rate of 9.9 percent.

In a work force of June’s number of 154,926,000, that’s an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent.

UPDATE: Apparently we’re in the Economy of the Beast, with 6.66 million lost jobs over 19 months of contraction.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A few folks with serious reading-comprehension issues are interpreting this post as accusing the Bureau of Labor Statistics of “fudging” the unemployment numbers. No, BLS has always taken the “discouraged workers” out of their workforce pool, and I never suggested that they did not. It’s just that the number of them in this recession means the BLS definition of “unemployed” is working out in an extremely convenient manner for the Obama administration. Roughly 800,000 people who want jobs and can’t find any disappeared off the books.

The unemployment rate declined from month to month, even though the total number of Americans employed with a job decreased. If you don’t find that a signal that the happy headlines are misleading, I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Read the full article here.

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