UNIT 9: RAISING FINANCE

UNIT 9: RAISING FINANCE

You have a brilliant but unusual business idea. You could put all your life savings into it, and ask friends and family to invest in it as well. But this may not be enough. Or your friends may, perhaps wisely, refuse to lend you money. You go to your local bank, but they don't understand your idea and suggest you look elsewhere.

You go to a venture capitalist. Venture capitalists are used to looking at new ideas, especially in hi-tech industries, and they see the potential in your brilliant idea. The venture capitalist also recommends it to some business angels, private investors looking for new start-ups to invest in. They provide you with seed capital to set up your business.

You launch your business and it's a great success. But the amount of money it generates from sales is not enough to invest in it further: it's not self-financing, so you’ll decide to raise more capital in an initial public offering or IPO: your company is floated and you issue shares on a stock market for the first time, perhaps a market or a section of one that specialises in shares in hi-tech companies.

You wait anxiously for the day of theissue or float. Interest from investors is high and all the shares are sold. Over the next few weeks, there is a stream of favourable news from your company about its sales, new products and the brilliant new people it has managed to recruit. The shares increase steadily in value.

Now look at this process from the point of view of investors. The venture capitalists and business angels, for example, know that most new businesses will fail, but that a few will do reasonably well and one or two will, with luck, hit the jackpot, paying back all the money they lost on unprofitable projects and much more. This exemplifies the classic trade-off between risk and return, the idea that the riskier an investment is, the more profit you require from it.

In your IPO, there may be investors who think that your company might be a future IBM or Microsoft, and they want to get in on the ground floor, holding on to the shares as they increase inexorably in value. They make large capital gains that can be realised when they sell the shares. Or they may anticipate selling quickly and making a quick profit.

Other investors may prefer to avoid the unpredictable world of tech stocks altogether and go for steady but unspectacular returns from established, well-known companies. These are the blue chips that form the basis of many conservative investmentportfolios. One day in a few years' time, when your company is mature and growing at five or 10 per cent a year, rather than doubling in size every six months, your brilliant business idea may have become a blue chip company itself.

Governments increasingly depend on investment from the private sector for their public projects. These public-private partnerships are financed by a combination of commercial investment and public money from taxation and government borrowing.

Discussion questions:

1. What are the ways to raise finance for your start-up?

2. What is the prospective of any newly-founded business from the point of investors?

3. Explain the concept of public-private partnerships.

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