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Posts Tagged ‘IPO candidates’

A123’s smash-hit IPO could herald more green debuts

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 28, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I think that we last week saw a start of a new boom, A123 soured on the IPO, and many candidates are waiting in line. Here is piece on the issue from Reuters.

“SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 24 (Reuters) – A 50 percent leap in the shares of lithium-ion battery maker A123 Systems Inc (AONE.O) on their first day of trading looks likely to jumpstart the market for clean-tech share offerings.

The Watertown, Mass.-based A123 Systems is now worth over $1.9 billion, a striking valuation for a company that has yet to make a profit and still needs large-scale commercialization.

Industry executives and experts said A123’s success shows investors have an appetite for green technology companies that lose money, but have tremendous potential.

So the stock’s first day jump, which is the second-best performance for a debut stock in 2009, should encourage more venture capital-backed clean technology companies to go public, they added.

“This is an interesting time for the market because there are several (clean-tech) companies that have been growing very nicely,” said Faysal Sohail, managing director of venture fund CMEA Capital, which is an investor in A123.

Sohail declined to comment specifically on A123, but said the whole environment is creating opportunities for clean-tech companies and expects 2010 to be a busy year for green IPOs.

“They are real companies with substantial revenue and growing at a very fast clip,” he said.

CMEA Capital also backs companies such as Silicon Valley solar manufacturer Solyndra and biofuel company Codexis, which many see as likely candidates for the IPO market.

Other green companies deemed ripe for an IPO include smart grid network company Silver Spring Networks, electric carmaker Tesla Motors and solar thermal company BrightSource Energy.”

Read the full article here.

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More IPO gossip, new prospects include: Greenplum, LinkedIn, Pacific Biosciences and Zynga

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Market research, Strategy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a recent article from CNN.

“If you have been an investor in technology IPOs in recent months you’ve done well.

Starting in April, and really gathering momentum this summer, there has been a slew of tech companies that leapt through the public market window including Changyou (CYOU), Rosetta Stone (RST), OpenTable (OPEN), and most recently Emdeon (EM).”

The article continues,

“Right now in Silicon Valley, investment bankers are busy making the rounds of promising portfolio companies trying to convince them of the wisdom of an IPO. There is always the question of what kind of company can – or should – go public. During the last wave of tech IPOs, after the dotcom bust, the rule of thumb was that firms with $100 million in revenue and profitability were IPO candidates.

Investment bankers on the prowl in Silicon Valley

Now, according to one prominent venture capitalist who asked to remain anonymous, investment bankers are telling him, “If a company can show revenue of $15 million per quarter, a good business model – and if not profitability, a path to profits – they can deliver an oversubscribed offering.” (One wonders wonder whether these simply are investment bankers who have had nothing to do for the last 12 months, trying to make their bonus figures.)

Venture capitalists have not had much to be happy about, either. It wasn’t just IPOs, but acquisitions that came to a screeching halt during the recession. Both of these groups desperately want the IPO window to stay open, and so far it is.”

And concludes,

“In Google’s day it was bulge-bracket investment banks – Morgan Stanley (MS), CSFB (CS), Goldman (GS), Lehman Bros or no one. The economics of the banks (characterized as going “down-market” to even do $500 million IPOs) required bigger deals. Today’s deals, with their much more modest size, are better tailored for the boutique banks – Thomas Weisel Partners, Jeffries, JMP Securities, Piper Jaffray, and the like. These are the banks pounding the streets in Silicon Valley the hardest.

Could it all end badly? Of course, and usually it does when the rush toward IPOs at some point sends half-baked companies into the public markets and they tank. But between now and then we are likely to see a group of very high quality tech companies look to go public – think Greenplum, LinkedIn, Pacific Biosciences and Zynga among many others.

For those investors with the stomach, it might not get much better.”

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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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Zappo provide returns for Sequoia

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Economy, Gerbsman Partners, google, Investments, Market research, Strategy, Venture Capital, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on July 27, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good VC article from Alibaba.

“BURLINGAME, Calif. — Marc Andreessen, in a recent Forbes interview, noted there are hundreds of venture-capital outfits slogging it out right now, trying desperately to squeeze profits out of a terrible investing environment–but only a handful worth their salt.

He’s right. And this week’s news that Amazon.com ( AMZN – news – people ) would buy online-shoe retailer Zappos for $807 million in Amazon stock, plus some cash, highlights the staying power of one of those perennial Sand Hill Road stars, Sequoia Capital.

Sequoia is the notoriously tough firm that backed winners like Google ( GOOG – news – people ), Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), Cisco ( CSCO – news – people ), YouTube and PayPal. (I could go on.) It also owned a big chunk of Zappos, a company with a somewhat unlikely business model that excelled by providing unparalleled customer service and shoe selection on the Web. Sequoia recently told its investors it put about $48 million into Zappos and will get just over $169 million from the Amazon transaction. That’s not a “home run” in VC parlance. But it’s a very respectable return of about three-and-a-half times Sequoia’s original investment, particularly in these depressed times.

In the first six months of this year, there were only four tech-related M&A deals of over $100 million involving companies that took venture capital, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association. (There were a few VC-backed IPOs in the first half, too, but no blockbusters.) The biggest of the tech M&A deals, Cisco Systems‘ $590 million purchase of camcorder maker Pure Digital Technologies, also involved Sequoia, which owned a small stake.

Sequoia’s profits from that deal were very small, but it still made a nice return: Sequoia told its investors in March that it invested just over $1.4 million in Pure Digital and would receive $13 million in Cisco shares and $1 million in cash after the acquisition. (The biggest VC-related deal in the first half of this year was Medtronic’s ( MDT – news – people ) $700 million purchase of CoreValve, a company with a new catheter technology to improve heart-valve replacements. Sequoia doesn’t do health care investing.) Plenty of other VCs have sold companies in fire sales this year for less than what investors put into them.”

Read the whole article here.

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