VC

April 22, 2011

Future Ventures IPO Review and Analysis – Unique Indian Consumption Private Equity/Venture Capital Company with Cheap Valuation is a Good Buy

Future Ventures is a VC/Private Equity Company that has invested in a number of small Indian companies and startups mainly focused on the consumption industry in India.With India growing at around 8-9% in the last few years and expectations of strong future growth driven by consumption,Future Ventures seems a good investment considering the portfolio of companies that it owns (analyzed below).Future Ventures is a part of the Future Group run by Kishore Biyani who started India's most famous retail company Pantaloons.The Company has set a price band of 10-11 rupees a share with a target of raising around Rs. 750crore though the IPO.This would represent around 40% of the equity which would give it a post IPO market capitalization of around $375 million.Note the company had tried to come with an IPO 2 years ago but it was deemed to expensive at that time.

April 14, 2011

Solar Micro Inverter Market – Small Size but Huge Growth Ahead,Solar Microinverter Companies

Solar Microinverters typciall sell for 75-90c/watt which means that if all the solar installations in the world at around 18 GW were done using microinverters,then the size of the addressable market would be $12.5-16 billion,however a lot of the installations are larger than 1 MW in which micro inverters are not used.Also micro inverters are mainly sold in the US and Canada so the total size of the addressable market becomes more like 500 MW which is around $$375-450 million dollars.Enphase Energy the biggest microinverter manufacturer has sold around 500,000 prouducts which implies total lifetime revenues of around $40 million.According to IMS Research around 1 GW of microinverters would be installed in 2013 and the market size would be around $700 million.I think the market size will be greater given that other geographies have not been penetrated,the residential solar market is growing faster and more companies will lead to a bigger market

March 16, 2011

Algae Biofuel Green Company Solazyme $100mm IPO (Financials,Partners,Costs,Pros and Cons) – Tempting though Risky

Algae Based Biofuels have been hyped in the media as a potential panacea to our Crude Oil based Transportation problems. Algae Based Biofuels as a Green Investing Opportunity is still some years away as the technology is still quite nascent.Despite a lot of hoopla and a number of IPO’s with synthetic biofuels as business,large scale commercial production and profits are still some time away.However the promise of this technology to revolutionize the Fossil Fuel powered Transportation Sector is Huge.Large Oil and Gas is already positioning itself in a small way to take advantage of this opportunity.Shell has been the biggest investor in Biofuels with a $12 Billion tie up with Brazilian Sugar Giant Cosan.The advantages of Algae Biofuels are being propagated by strong backers like Bill Gates ,Rockefeller family and Exxon Mobil.The main advantages of algae based biofuels are Efficient Land Usage,Reduction in Global Warming affect and ability to be directly used in vehicles and aircraft.However Algae Biofuel Technology is still quite immature despite startups like Solazyme,Algenol,Sapphire Energy and Synthetic Genomics having made impressive strides.

August 4, 2010

Guest Post : Guide to successful VC investments

Paul Kedrosky’s research had pointed out, it takes a VC to invest $50 million and be in the industry for seven years to make a good […]

June 4, 2010

Is Algae Based Biofuel a Great Green Investment Opportunity

Why Algae based Biofuels Algae Based Biofuels have been hyped in the media as a potential panacea to our Crude Oil based Transportation problems. The advantages […]