IBM To Bring Venture Capital into China (ZT)

转自http://www.tmcnet.com/

链接：http://www.tmcnet.com/u/2006/10/27/2021175.htm

[October 27, 2006]

IBM To Bring Venture Capital into China

(Comtex Business Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) BEIJING, Oct 27, 2006 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) --The world's IT giant IBM is about to tap into the Chinese venture capital market this week with USD 180 million, according to sources.

Lehman Brothers, the global leading investment bank, will be the partner of IBM in the move, and the concrete shareholding proportion in the venture fund will be unveiled at the end of this week. And the venture capital will be mainly injected into Chinese Web2.0 companies.

Drew Clark, the cofounder of IBM Venture Capital Group, showed interest in Web2.0 in recent interviews, saying that Web2.0 has become the direction for the development of the global Internet Industry and IBM will team up with more venture firms to make investments into promising Web2.0 companies.

For IBM, which saw overall income of USD 22.6 billion and profit of USD 2.2 billion in the last quarter, USD 180 million is just a small figure, but the move again reveals international venture capitalists' favor for Internet Web2.0. Arvind Sodhani, senior vice president of Intel Corporation and president of Intel Capital, said a month ago that Web2.0 really excited him and they would actively make investments in Web2.0 firms.

Although IBM holds a cautious attitude towards venture capital investment and does not set up a special venture investment fund like Intel, it has kept close contacts with venture capitalists such as Mayfield, Accel, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. So far, it has invested in over 1,000 companies. Different from Intel and Motorola, IBM does not purely make investments but acts as a go-between linking venture capitalists and innovative firms with clients. In the light of incomplete statistics, IBM Venture Capital Group has established partnership with around 1,000 companies, becoming the bellwether in the market acknowledged by venture capital firms.

With a view to the leading position, IBM's move in the Chinese market makes overseas venture capitalists shift their attention to China one by one. In the first three quarters of this year, China's mainland attracted venture capital of USD 1.65 billion in total, according to statistics from market research firm. China will become the third largest destination of venture capitals in the world following the United States and Israel.

Insiders also reveal that IBM will make investments in a wide range of sectors, including IT, Internet, new materials, environmental protection, medicine, energy, and so on. However, the real estate industry, the hottest one in China, fails to win the favor of IBM. This perhaps has a direct bearing on the government's unclear attitude towards foreign capitalists' intervention into the sector.

From www.nbd.com.cn, Page 1, Thursday, October 26, 2006
[e-mail]

Copyright (C) 2006 SinoCast LLC. All rights reserved