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Posts Tagged ‘Goldman Sachs Group Inc’

Facebook raises $1.5 billion in investments so far

Posted in boic, Business models, tagged , , , , , on January 23, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Article from SFGate.

“In the company’s most revealing disclosure of its financial plans to date, Facebook Inc. said Friday that it has raised $1.5 billion in investments and planned to start reporting its finances publicly by April 2012.

The Palo Alto social networking powerhouse remains private, but a news release issued 15 minutes after the close of the stock markets signals that Facebook is moving closer to an initial public offering.

Facebook officials had previously remained mum on published reports that surfaced as the new year dawned about a deal that would bring a $450 million investment from New York’s Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and an additional $50 million from Digital Sky Technologies Inc. of Russia.

But the news release was Facebook’s first public statement on those reports, and it confirmed the investments were based on a company valuation of $50 billion.

Facebook also said it had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from Goldman Sachs, which planned to raise that money by selling shares of a special Facebook fund to select clients.”

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Silicon Valley Gears Up for Acquisitions as Economy Improves

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is some interresting news from Bloomberg.

“Silicon Valley companies looking to put their cash to work may drive a wave of mergers this year, bankers and venture capitalists say.

Companies are eager to make acquisitions because many of them have cut research budgets, says Robert Ackerman, founder and managing director of Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, California. That means they’re not as able to fall back on their own ingenuity to fuel growth. More businesses are relying on acquisitions to find their next new product or service, he says.

“The product cabinet is bare, but the market continues to move forward,” Ackerman said. “Wherever you see innovation sprint ahead, companies will have a product deficit, and will look to fill it.”

Google Inc., based in Mountain View, is currently one of California’s most acquisitive companies, buying at least five businesses in 2010. It agreed to buy Picnik Inc. last month, acquiring online photo-editing tools. Its purchase of DocVerse provided it with software that lets people share documents over the Internet. The value of the deals wasn’t disclosed.

The state’s largest single deal this year was Shiseido Co.’s purchase of San Francisco-based Bare Escentuals Inc. for about $1.7 billion.

California deal-making plummeted after 2007, when more than 2,670 transactions totaled almost $254 billion. So far this year, there have been about 530, worth $16.7 billion. That’s a higher number than in the first three months of 2009, although the value was greater in that year-ago period, at about $30 billion.

McAfee, Tibco

Local acquisition targets include Santa Clara’s McAfee Inc., Tibco Software Inc. in Palo Alto and Cupertino-based ArcSight Inc., according to Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS AG in San Francisco. McAfee and ArcSight both make programs that protect data, which could be more valuable as cyber threats mount. Tibco’s software helps programs of all kinds share information.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. also cited San Francisco’s Salesforce.com Inc. and Palo Alto-based VMware Inc. as possibilities — though those companies aren’t the most likely targets, the firm says. Salesforce.com makes online customer- relationship software, while VMware sells so-called virtualization programs, which help computers run more than one operating system. Representatives from all the targets declined to comment or didn’t respond to messages.

Deal Volume

In Northern California, there were 45 deals involving venture-backed startups during the first three months of 2010, according to the National Venture Capital Association. That was the highest number in any quarter in at least five years.

More than 50 companies in California have at least $1 billion in cash and equivalents, which they could use for acquisitions. They’re led by a Bay area trio: San Francisco’s Wells Fargo & Co., with $68 billion; Cisco Systems Inc. in San Jose, with $39.6 billion; and Cupertino-based Apple Inc., with $24.8 billion, according to Bloomberg data.

“There’s a lot of cash on people’s balance sheets, so I think it’s a great time for startups,” said Kate Mitchell, managing director at Scale Venture Partners in Foster City, California. “They see that the faster, better, cheaper venture- backed companies are still growing, and they’re not spending on R&D, so they can be accretive.”

The value of deals in California topped out at $378.1 billion in 2000 during the Internet bubble, when there were more than 2,200 transactions. It took five years for the number of deals to surpass that earlier peak, and the dollar amount has never come close to recapturing the dot-com era’s glory.

Internet Bust

While the latest recession was the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, it actually wasn’t as devastating to California deal-making as the dot-com collapse. After having easy access to venture money and initial public offerings in the late-1990s and 2000, money dried up. The M&A industry hit bottom in 2002, when just 1,505 transactions accounted for $95.3 billion.

The deals crept back up over the next four years, peaking again in 2006 and early 2007. There were 665 in the first quarter of 2007, valued at $59.8 billion. That’s more than three times the number reported last quarter.

Tor Braham, head of technology mergers and acquisitions for Deutsche Bank AG in San Francisco, says mergers are ready to surge again for two reasons.

Pressure’s On?

“Private-equity funds have raised a lot of money before the financial crisis and there’s pressure on them to spend it before those commitments expire,” he said. Also: “Sellers want to get their deals done this year, before the expected increase in capital gains tax rate.”

Private-equity firms raised $538 billion in 2006 and $587 billion in 2007, just before the recession, according to the Private Equity Council in Washington. Capital-gains taxes, meanwhile, could rise above 20 percent for people earning more than $250,000 under budget proposals before Congress.

In the first quarter, Deutsche Bank advised Techwell Inc. in its $370 million takeover by Intersil Corp. The bank also worked with Nimsoft Inc. in its $350 million acquisition by CA Inc., and Francisco Partners on its sale of Numonyx BV to Micron Technology Inc. for about $1.3 billion.”

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IPO Issuance Steps Up

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, Investments, Market research, Technology, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 1, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Good news are starting to come across from market indicators. The economy is slowly starting to turn its heavy pessimism to a optimistic, normal belief of opportunity. Looking at these indicators on IPO filings, there are plenaty of opportunities on the horizon.

Here ar some good news posted by Wall Street Journal.

“The pace of new stock offerings perked up this spring after a cold winter, but the market for new issues still has a long way to go before a real recovery.

The story was the same in every corner of the world. At best, there was a pickup in issuance in the second quarter of 2009 from the first quarter, but there was nowhere near the levels of a year earlier.

World-wide, 78 companies raised $10.6 billion in initial public offerings of stock in the second quarter, up from 54 deals that raised just $1.3 billion in the first three months of 2009, according to data from Dealogic, which tracks new issues. But in the second quarter of 2008, 243 new public companies sold $33.4 billion of shares, by Dealogic’s count. All data exclude real-estate investment trusts and empty shell companies known as special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.

If comparisons with last year aren’t sobering enough, consider this: In the second quarter of 2007, 469 companies raised a total of $88.2 billion — six times the number and more than eight times the dollar volume of the latest three months.

“In terms of volume of issuance, let’s face it, we’re still in the very early innings of recovery,” says Kevin Willsey, head of equity capital markets for the Americas at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.

U.S. pricings in the latest quarter totaled 10, valued at $1.3 billion, compared with 11 deals that raised $4.2 billion in the 2008 period. Latin America and India each had one IPO for the second quarter, while Russia and Australia had none.

The largest offering in the world during the second quarter was the $4.27 billion raised on the Bovespa stock exchange by VisaNet, the Brazilian affiliate of credit-card network Visa Inc.

China had 13 IPOs in the second quarter that raised a combined $2.9 billion, compared with 20 that raised $2.3 billion a year ago; Europe had 10 deals totaling just $209 million, compared with 79 that raised $12.1 billion.

Still, bankers appear more optimistic now about the IPO market than at any time since last fall, with many saying there could be a stronger pickup in issuance in the second part of this year.

U.S. IPOs have performed well on their debuts this year. The May offering of OpenTable Inc. generated the best first-day performance since late 2007, before the stock-market meltdown. The company, which raised $60 million in its offering, rose 59% on its first day of trading.

The outlook for the IPO market depends on whether there are nasty surprises in second-quarter earnings reports, which will start arriving by the middle of this month, stable prices in the broader stock market and continued hopes for economic recovery.”

In this articl, Lynn cowan closes by saying:

“More deals later in the year would play into historical buying patterns by large institutions such as mutual funds and hedge funds, says Joe Castle, head of U.S. equities syndicate at Barclays Capital. “Fall is a popular time to buy IPOs,” he says, “because it positions portfolios with high-growth companies for the following calendar year and boosts performance for the current year if they trade well initially.”

Despite glimmers of hope in some areas of the world, like the U.S., bankers and investors alike are aware things could suddenly take a turn for the worse.

“We don’t see firms storming the gates to launch into the IPO market right now,” says David DiPietro, president of boutique investment bank Signal Hill in Baltimore. “We probably need to see another quarter of solid earnings from a broad base of companies.”

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