

Japan Venture Capital Funds Face Mergers as IPOs Fade  - noor420
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=afpWYmx_Xp.0&refer=home

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barry-cotter
_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.

