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Follow live coverage of the DLD in Munich, Germany, a gathering of 800 entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, scientists, artists and creative minds from around the world.
With global diversity in attendees and an interdisciplinary perspective of digital, media, design, art, science, brands, consumers and society, the conference is known as the European forum for the “creative class”. Follow live coverage here.
Want to be the first to know what companies will be the next household name? BusinessWeek has started a section on its webpage that will keep track of promising start-ups that might see the limelight. Flip through the slide show for a look at all the profiles. You can also make a suggestion of a new company worth profiling and send it in to BusinessWeek.
Welcome to America’s Most Promising Startups, an ongoing series profiling new companies from across the country that embody the creativity and resiliency common among today’s entrepreneurs. Based on suggestions from our readers and staffers, we’ll be adding more profiles on a regular basis, so check back often. Our goal is to showcase promising companies before they become household names.
A recent side-by-side comparison of the U.S. and Chinese economies produced a startling result: There were $34.8 billion of initial public offerings in China this year and only $13.7 billion in the U.S.
With numbers like that, is it any surprise that Western fund managers are scrambling to get a bite of the immensely profitable Chinese market for new companies? As the New York Times reported, U.S.-based Blackstone Group has formed a partnership with Shanghai’s municipal government to raise a $732 million private equity fund.
What’s different this time is that Blackstone’s fund is denominated in the Chinese currency, which is officially called the renminbi. Blackstone’s idea is to take advantage of capital from China’s increasingly wealthy institutional and private investors. The fund will then use the investments to buy companies and take them public, earning a hopefully large profit along the way. There is plenty of interest in the Chinese market for new companies—Carlyle Group announced this week that it had invested $60 million in three Chinese growth companies. So there is no shortage of domestic companies ripe for turnaround [Source].
From the ruins of the credit crunch, a new financial order will emerge. Its shape is not yet known, but is already hotly debated. Will there be a new model for investment banking? The socialisation of risk? A return to Keynesianism? What role will hedge funds and private equity play? And government and regulators?
In this series of exclusive video interviews, Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times, talks to some of the chief protagonists – bankers, policymakers, financiers – and asks them to explain not just what happened, but also how they think finance will adapt to the post-crash world.
Facebook, the popular social network, has found a deep-pocketed friend in Russia.
Digital Sky Technologies, an Internet investment company based in Moscow, said Tuesday it has invested $200 million in Facebook in exchange for a 1.96 percent stake in the company, and would eventually offer to buy at least $100 million in Facebook’s common stock. Facebook said the deal values the entire company — which Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, founded in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 — at $10 billion.
More details about the deal can be found here. A backgrounder on this story can be found here.
Today, the world’s biggest bank delivers dreadful results. Citigroup recorded a net loss of $9.8 billion, driven by a whopping $18.1 billion in pre-tax write-downs and credit costs on exposure to subprime mortgages.
Worse, it is no longer just collateralised-debt obligations and other complex securitised products that are hurting the world’s largest bank (by assets if no longer by market value). Credit cards and other consumer-finance businesses are deteriorating fast as America’s economy flirts with recession.
Capital markets around the world ended the day all in red digits. What more can we expect the upcoming weeks when other leading financials record their 4Q and FY2007 results? How much more write downs can capital markets digest? How can we fix it?
Micro-loans made to third-world entrepreneurs are changing lives and fortunes around the world. CNBC published an article on success stories on Kiva’s microfinance loans here.
The Kiva wesite was founded by Jessica and Matt Flannery. They were newly weds – he a software engineer, she an MBA student at Stanford – who were convinced they could use the Internet to put people in need together with people willing to help. Anyway, this is how Kiva works.
What’s currently on the radar screen of Venture Capitalists (VCs)? In short, finally, they are starting to look beyond China and India respectively: Central and Eastern Europe.
At the very moment, first, there is Central and Eastern Europe. At least $500 million is sitting in fund targeting the Central and Eastern European region and much more is foreseen. This growth is enabled by a few success stories such as Skype and Last.fm, and in turn, this has triggered a new wave of fresh and new European entrepreneurial spirit. Furthermore, the accession of ten new European Union members from Central and Easter European countries has spurred investments across the region. The previous locked up energetic talent in this region has now gained equal access – as their Western European counterparts – to European capital markets and legislative protection.
In addition, as BusinessWeek pointed out earlier VCs are even having their eyesight beyond the traditional BRIC and Next Eleven (N-11) countries for example out of all places, Colombia, Latin-America. A multitude of young, bright and entrepreneurial minded people is ready to take the country up on the economic ladder. BusinessWeek typified Colombia as an extreme emerging market. It take guts and political sensitivity to start investing there but it can reap endless possibilities.
Here you can find a list of the top 500 European hot growth companies. Another listing can be found here. The latest and greatest news on European Private Equity & venture capital can be found here.
Some more great webpages to keep you updated on any activity at the European VC front can be found here. European Venture Capital & Private Equity Journal; FT European Venture Capital Report; Venture Capital in Europe (Book); and Profitability of venture capital investment in Europe and the US (Research Paper).
If you’ve always wanted to be a Venture Capitalist, here’s your opportunity. Kiva according to their pressrelease is “the first microlending Web site designed to provide individuals with the ability to connect with and make personal loans to small businesses in developing countries. Founded in 2004 by Matthew and Jessica Flannery, Kiva’s goal is to reduce poverty in developing countries by giving entrepreneurs the ability to build their businesses through flexible loans with six-to 12-month terms. Kiva allows individuals to act as a “micro VC” by loaning directly to entrepreneurs with feasible business plans. Kiva is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. For more information about Kiva, please visit www.kiva.org” (see also a Businessweek article on Kiva for more information. I think this is a brilliant idea!).
[edit, on BBC I found an article, which mentions another peer-to-peer VC site called Global Giving.]
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