Japan Venture Capital Funds Face Mergers as IPOs Fade

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=afpWYmx_Xp.0&refer=home

by noor420 • 17 years ago

2 1 17 years ago

Only 49 companies went public last year, the fewest since 1992, depriving venture firms of the source of 45 percent of revenue and 90 percent of profits, based on data from 2007.

Japanese funds, which together manage 1.04 trillion yen ($10.6 billion), get more than twice as much revenue from IPOs as U.S. and European firms, according to Venture Enterprise.

From 5 minutes googling the firms mentioned as the largest Japanese VC funds they appear to be more along the lines of exchange traded funds, or at leat they appear to be actual companies themsleves that are traded on a stock exchange, not something I think you can do in the US (SEC rules etc., must have mucho money to be an accredited investor) This means they can't go "Right, so we'll sit on our money for two years then" like a consistently profitable, but not Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins level fund could in the US. They're vulnerable to the stupidities of the quarterly results driven market, and could theoretically be bought up for market cap and the individual components sold off at a profit[1].

This screams money to be made to me. Not by me, unfortunately, but if someone had fluent Japanese and English and was enough of a hacker to do a proper appraisal on some of these companies could get together with someone with VC experience, IPO and M&A experience they could do an analysis on portfolio companies and make offers.

Summary: With a Japanese-English bilingual team, Techs capable of doing technical due diligence, and finance people with domain expertise, assets could be bought for very good value.

[1] I have no idea if this is likely to happen to any of these companies or not. It's mainly illustrative. Also, sometimes having a market cap lower than book value is sometimes correct. GM has been in that situation since the 70s.

Japan Venture Capital Funds Face Mergers as IPOs Fade

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