Prepared by Capital Hunter analysts:
Venture capital investment rose again this period to $393 million, which was better than expected considering that the Christmas holiday season tends to be a time of soft returns. The bigger surprise of the period however was the dominance of online companies, especially in the media & entertainment sector. Online companies accounted for close to 40% of the period’s total venture investment, led prominently by Home Décor Products, which received a $65 million Series C investment from top European VC firm 3i Group (which recently sold San Diego-backed biotech firm Domantis to GlaxoSmithKline for $454 million, netting them a 100% annualized return), Liberty Associated Partners and Comcast Interactive, and iLike.com, a social music directory service which raised $13.3 million in strategic funding from TicketMaster. Software and medical device investment continued to do well, as they accounted for 12% and 14%, respectively, of the week’s funding totals, continuing the trend of the past few weeks, in which those industries have outpaced the competition. We expect the weekly totals to drop drastically next week, with the possibility that the decline will continue into the following weeks. For now there is not much to report.
The IPO market, which exploded last period with no less than seventeen companies going public, came back down to Earth this period, though the numbers are still good nonetheless. Nine companies went public, including Melco PBL Entertainment, an operator of casinos and entertainment resorts in Macau, which raised over a billion dollars, the third company to do so in the past two months, with Hertz and Spirit Aerosystems being the other two. Other notable IPOs include Solarfun Power Holdings, Claymont Steel Holdings and Artes Medical, which raised over $50 million in late stage funding in March of this year. For more information of these companies I encourage you to use the links below, which will take you to Yahoo! Finance where you can find a lot of information about the company that interests you. Without further ado, here are the public markets nine newest companies:
Trina Solar, priced 5.3 million shares at $18.50 a share for $98.05 million.
Melco PBL Entertainment, priced 60.25 million shares at $19.00 a share for $1.145 billion.
Fuwei Films, priced 3.75 million shares at $8.28 a share for $31.1 million.
Claymont Steel Holdings, priced 8.7 million shares at $17.00 a share for $147.9 million.
Transforma Acquisition Group, priced 12.5 million shares at $8.00 a share for $100 million.
Solarfun Power Holdings, priced 12 million shares at $12.50 a share for $150 million.
Dayton Superior, priced 7.85 million shares at $12.00 a share for $94.2 million.
Artes Medical, priced 4.6 million shares at $6.00 a share for $27.6 million.
Universal Power Group, priced 3 million shares at $7.00 a share for $21 million.
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