Pages tagged: 'Growth'
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On the Bounce
2021 has seen a bounce-back in venture equity investment. Some of this is post 2020 COVID related but is there something else going on?
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Scale Up or Cover Up?
Investing in fast growing scale up businesses that generate over 100X is the stuff analysts dream of. Yet it can so easily all go wrong, no matter how deep your pockets are. Cast your mind back to 2012 and imagine that you’d been offered the opportunity to invest in a technology business that was changing the way people and businesses work.
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Will Europe overtake the US for Tech?
Earlier this year Forbes updated it’s list of the most successful tech companies. Europe is larger, more populous and arguably more creative than the US. Yet why do we still not match the US for tech?
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Should Interest Rates Interest Tech Investors?
So the BoE has finally signalled its intent to return to normalised monetary policy and raised interest rates. It’s accepted that it will not have much effect on the incoming spike in inflation - caused mainly by exchange rates – but may well have a detrimental effect on already fragile economic growth. Adding this to the headwinds of Brexit, does this signal danger for the tech investor or opportunity?
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Biggest may not be Best
The brightest stars get most attention but are unicorn company returns quite so fabulous? Tech market analysts CB Insights keep a track of the world’s unicorn companies – those private companies valued at more than $1billion. CB Insights reckons that there are now 183 such companies worldwide, with a combined value of $657bn.
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ARMing for Innovation
Within weeks of the UK’s Brexit vote, Japan’s Softbank announced that it had agreed to acquire the darling of the UK tech scene – ARM Holdings - for £24bn. At a stroke, not only is this the largest purchase of British innovation but also removes the independence of the last of the UK’s “super unicorn” (i.e. >$10bn value) company. With the acquisition has the outlook improved – or worsened – for UK innovation?
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Expecting the Future
When a new CEO starts with an organisation or project he or she often has a “90 day plan”. When particle physics researchers at CERN started a project in 1991 to share information, they forgot to have such a plan and introduced the internet into a brave new world. As we’ve reached the 100th “90 days” since that launch, how does the Internet cornucopia stack up against Pandora’s box?
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Why Some Bubbles Burst
Nick Woodman is one of those rare breed of golden geese that have made more than $1bn through a technology innovation. In Nick’s case (he founded GoPro in 2002 to take action surfing shots) it wasn’t that he even made a technical breakthrough – he simply took existing technologies (firstly 35mm film and then digital cameras) and used them in a new and disruptive way. GoPro was once the darling of investors but why did this tech hit a bad wave?
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Disruptive is the New Norm
Investors like disruptive businesses because they can potentially lead to outsize returns and the term has been around for a while now – it was first coined by Clayton Christensen in 1995. But how do you identify the winners?
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Technology Takeover
This month Apple reported a net profit $18bn, topping ExxonMobil’s previous quarterly record of $15.9bn in 2012. And if this wasn’t enough, the record profit was a huge 37 per cent up on the previous year. Apple has now shipped more than 1billion iPhones, iPads and iPods. With Apple posting the largest ever corporate profit, is technology ready to become the lead sector across the globe?
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Is Surge Replacing Hype?
Many years ago, Gartner created it’s Hype cycle – a seminal model that describes how every technology innovation from printing to bitcoins goes through an initial period of interest and hype, then falls into a trough as disillusionment kicks in, only for enlightenment to bring recovery. The problem facing the tech investor is knowing just where you are on the hype cycle and how deep the trough might be. But this week, respected tech veterans have described a new phenomenon: the Surge cycle. Is it time for a new model for tech?
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