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一个勇敢的主权财富基金的新世界
More and more sovereign wealth funds are betting big on technology companies and start-ups. But they're late out of the starting gate – and some fear that inexperience may cost them.
In a rare embrace of modernity for deeply conservative Saudi Arabia — which faced violent clashes after the introduction of television 50 years ago and still doesn’t allow women to drive — Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman revealed last summer that the kingdom’s future will be digital. Prince Mohammed, the brash young face of the House of Saud and chair of the country’s Council of Economic and Development Affairs, boarded a private jet to California in June to mingle with Silicon Valley whiz kids and the venture capital gods who can make or break them. Swapping his traditional thobe for a pair of blue jeans and a blazer, the grinning 31-year-old posed with Mark Zuckerberg for a photo shoot at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. Just a few weeks earlier, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had broken the record for the all-time biggest single investment in a venture-backed company when it cut a $3.5 billion check to Uber Technologies.
论坛可能是一个最激进的国有企业investors in tech these days, but it’s not alone. A number of sovereign wealth funds, their portfolios hobbled by years of heavy investment in low-yielding bonds, have been plowing billions into new technologies and start-ups, hoping to bag the next Facebook. According to data from Institutional Investor’s Sovereign Wealth Center, these government-owned investment funds poured nearly $7 billion into private technology companies in 2016, shattering their previous record of $2.5 billion, set in 2014. But the Uber investment raises the question of whether PIF — and investors like it — are in over their heads.
Saudi cash took the unicorn club (venture-backed private companies valued at more than $1 billion) to new heights when Uber’s valuation topped $68 billion last June. But shortly after that news broke, the San Francisco–based taxi app rode into a maelstrom of controversies: CEO Travis Kalanick got caught berating an Uber driver in a viral video, hundreds of thousands of users staged a boycott over Kalanick’s support of President Donald Trump, a former employee published an account of sexual harassment, and the company continues to face an exodus from key management positions.
Uber’s troubles are a bad omen for a market that pundits and soothsayers have been calling a bubble. The number of venture-backed companies worth $1 billion or more soared from 45 in January 2014 to 154 as of December 2016, according to data from the华尔街日报。由于独角兽乘以将兔子羞辱的速度,主权财富基金集体管理约6.5万亿美元,成为长期私人资本的有希望的来源。但有些专家们质疑资金是否有技术诀窍,避免在今天的泡沫技术市场中燃烧。
Long considered a trailblazer and role model in the sovereign community for both its prudent approach to direct investing and its tech savvy, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, which holds about $354 billion, according to Sovereign Wealth Center estimates, decided years ago to devote special attention to the risks and opportunities arising from the breakneck speed of technological adoption and innovation across all sectors, from health care to energy to manufacturing.
“越来越难以分类,这是技术公司,哪些不是,”GIC的首席执行官和集团首席投资官员林禾凯斯特表示。“在”技术部门“的传统定义仍然相关的范围内,我们将其视为包括整个连锁店,从初创公司到建立的行业巨头。在各个阶段,公司之间存在强大的联系,但关键是在自上而下的分配中,但自下而上,逐个名称选择。“
Over the past decade state-owned investors have pumped $25.7 billion into direct technology equity investments, with more than 80 percent of that total coming in since the start of 2014. GIC and its sister institution, Temasek Holdings, accounted for about two thirds of those investments, committing $7 billion and $10.2 billion, respectively, since 2006.
虽然公开上市的科技公司通常已经获得了狮子的主权美元份额,但去年标志着一个重大的转变,私人市场投资占总数的84%以上。在风险厌恶方面,主权资金已被犯错,但最近这些机构一直在为高风险的初创企业和后期增长公司分配更多,因为IPO前资金循环中的锚投资者爆发 - 有时甚至带头。Arch Vinure Partners的联合创始人Robert Nelsen积极尝试将主权财富资金招募到早期的回合,因为他们倾向于购买并通过IPO。
“而不是思考如何在IPO之后出售,他们正在考虑如何购买更多,”纳尔森说,他专门从事生物技术。在包括生物技术和医疗器械,包括生物技术和医疗器械的生命科学部门在2016年吸引了11.5%的主权资金开展技术支出。由于沙特阿拉伯对优步的投资,移动公司收到了一半,占总数的43%。否则,互联网公司将领先,在13投资中部署了近20亿美元。剩下的10亿美元在软件,硬件和咨询公司中分开。大约2亿美元前往网上和移动金融科技公司。
Biotech一直非常适合大型主权财富基金,因为所涉及的实验室工作通常需要大量资金超过其他行业的初创企业。纳尔森表示,由于这些机构管理数十亿美元,因此他们甚至不会考虑不到5000万美元的投资机会。“如果你是一个主权财富基金,一张1000万美元的支票是无关紧要的,”他说。“它必须是合理的资本,可以合理地在公司中工作以产生影响。”
The challenge of investing at scale is one of the biggest reasons some sovereigns are eschewing venture capital funds in favor of direct investing. Venture capital as an asset class is tightly constrained by the size and number of start-up companies available. Moreover, many of the top-performing venture firms stopped taking on new limited partners years ago. When Bessemer Venture Partners was raising its most recent, $1.6 billion, fund in 2015, partner Ed Colloton says, there was no need to market the fund beyond the firm’s existing investors, which are mostly foundations, university endowments, and family offices. “You’re not going to raise a bigger fund, so everybody just comes back to the table and reups for the new one,” he says.
Taking matters into its own hands, Saudi Arabia’s PIF announced in October that it would put a stunning $45 billion toward the creation of a technology fund run by Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank Group Corp. Despite the kingdom’s vast oil wealth, that’s not exactly pennies for PIF. Originally created as a development fund to divert a portion of Saudi Arabia’s oil money into strategically important industries and projects, the fund managed $157 billion in assets as of June 2016, mostly in domestic stocks and loans to local businesses.
The fund, which started in 1971 but until recently had little or no international visibility, emerged as the linchpin in Prince Mohammed’s economic reform agenda to wean the country off its dependence on hydrocarbons. Under new leadership PIF reengineered itself before taking the international stage in a full-blown tech offensive. It has since received a $27 billion transfer from the kingdom’s central bank, the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, as well as the kingdom’s ownership stake in the world’s biggest oil producer, Saudi Arabian Oil Co. Saudi officials insist the latter could be worth as much as $2 trillion, but that’s all tied up until the company’s planned IPO — if and when that happens.
11月,PIF在中午倾倒了半十亿美元,在迪拜开发的在线购物网站渴望成为中东的Amazon.com。
But in a not too shocking twist, it turns out Amazon also aspires to be the Amazon of the Middle East: The U.S. e-commerce behemoth reached an agreement to acquire Souq.com, an established online marketplace operated out of Dubai, for more than $650 million in March.发展强调了技术业务如何难以预测和切断的 - 而且只是大胆的沙特阿拉伯的PIF是如何抛弃其当前资产的缩小技术中断的不完美科学。“从历史上看,判断哪些公司将赚钱一直很难,”哥伦比尔在贝塞姆勒投资委员会,一家顶级风险公司举办投资委员会。“这项业务不是为了胆小的核心。”
为任何人保留主权财富基金的标题, Saudi’s investment in Uber felt like déjà vu. Two years before PIF arrived on the scene, the Qatar Investment Authority, which manages $338 billion by Sovereign Wealth Center estimates, raised eyebrows when it wrote a nine-digit check to Uber in 2014, for a $40 billion valuation. Founded in 2005, QIA had a reputation for hoarding glamorous hotels and luxury brands but relatively little experience identifying innovations outside its high-end comfort zone.
Qatari Sovereign基金于3月宣布,今年晚些时候将开设硅谷办公室。According to the Sovereign Wealth Center’s transaction database, QIA made its first independent foray into the tech sector in 2011, directly taking minority stakes in U.S. e-commerce start-up Coupons.com and French chip maker Altis Semiconductor SNC, for an estimated total of $50 million. That may only represent a basis point of the fund’s total portfolio, but neither company appears to be the next big thing: Altis was sold during insolvency proceedings last year, and Coupons.com’s share price has collapsed by 65 percent since its 2014 IPO.
In April the $23.5 billion New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZSF) revealed that its investment in cleantech start-up Ogin had gone bust; the company is now being wound down. The Kiwi sovereign fund invested $30 million in the Massachusetts wind turbine developer in 2013, a deal sourced through a little-known sovereign wealth fund coalition dubbed the Innovation Alliance. Hoping to pool skills and resources to better uncover, research, and invest in venture capital–style deals, New Zealand established the partnership in 2012 with the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA), which manages some $600 billion for the emirate by Sovereign Wealth Center estimates, and Alberta Investment Management Corp., which oversees $70 billion-plus in public funds for the Canadian province, including the $14 billion Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. The trio had mostly stayed out of the public eye before NZSF announced it had written down its investment in Ogin. AIMCo had also invested in the company; ADIA had passed.
“商业上,这对NZ超级基金没有成功投资,我们对结果感到失望,”马特·普莱耶在一份声明中说。“我们参加了这项投资,知道该公司是早期阶段。我们认为,由于早期的投资,与高回报的潜力有一个更广泛的可能结果。“
In Silicon Valley, where companies that have yet to turn a profit receive mind-boggling valuations, it’s even harder for investors to know whether they’re getting a raw deal. And sovereign funds aren’t the only new kids in town. In the past few years, mutual funds, hedge funds, pensions, and endowments have flocked to private tech companies in hopes of juicing their performance. Yet top entrepreneurs tend to gravitate toward established firms with legendary venture capitalists. “It’s against all odds to try to build a great company,” says Bessemer’s Colloton. “If you’re an entrepreneur, you want people in your boardroom who have experience in a particular area and understand the challenges and pitfalls out there.”
A common approach for large asset owners that want a little more bang for their buck is to partner with venture capital or private equity firms through co-investment opportunities, but building trust and credibility in this insular community is no walk in Menlo Park. Even funds like GIC, with hundreds of billions in the bank, have deemed it necessary to set up shop halfway around the world in Silicon Valley. Malaysia’s Khazanah Nasional opened an office there in 2013, and Singapore’s $180 billion state-owned investor Temasek opened a San Francisco office in February.
“While our investments are largely anchored in Asia, we recognize North America as a geography that offers good investment opportunities, particularly in the areas of technology, health care and life sciences,” a spokesman for Temasek tells亚博赞助欧冠。In January the firm bought an $800 million minority stake in Mountain View–based medical technology company Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences) from parent company Alphabet. “The setting up of our San Francisco office brings us closer to these opportunities and complements our existing team in New York, thereby increasing our coverage and connectivity across the U.S.,” the spokesman adds.
俄罗斯采取了类似的方法。RUSNANO集团。, an investment company established by the Russian government in 2011, opened an office around the corner from Stanford University that same year. Its mission: “to develop the Russian nanotechnology industry through co-investment in nanotechnology projects with substantial economic potential or social benefit.”
Although sovereign funds represent the financial interests of foreign governments, these notoriously passive shareholders typically don’t have a political agenda unless they’ve been given an explicit policy objective, usually in the form of economic development goals. “I think the larger, more global SWFs are mostly about financial gain, and I’ve seen little on the strategic side,” says Steve McLaughlin, founder and CEO of Financial Technology Partners, a San Francisco–based investment bank. “On the other hand, some SWFs, like EDBI in Singapore, have specific mandates to help bring business relationships to Singapore over time.”
新加坡经济发展委员会的投资扶手Edbi参加了7月淡紫色的10500万美元的资金循环,为Sprinklr。价值18亿美元,纽约社交媒体管理软件开发商计划使用新鲜资本扩展到新加坡。
Saudi’s PIF may have led the sovereign community in terms of dollars invested in tech companies in 2016 thanks to its one-off investment in Uber, but Singapore’s state-owned investors participated in the most deals: Temasek invested $1.3 billion in 22 deals, according to Sovereign Wealth Center data, while GIC invested $2.2 billion in 12. Khazanah Nasional rounded out the top three with six direct equity investments totaling $380 million.
在过去的十年中,淡马锡已经在科技公司造成了143次直接股权投资 - 并兑现。例如,中国电子商务平台阿里巴集团控股的一股约3700万美元的投资时间价值九倍。因此,在2016年,当2016年,当斯塔马斯克自金融危机自金融危机自腾出的第一次发布亏损时,它的解决方案是在技术部门上推行。去年电信,媒体和技术超越了金融股份为淡马锡投资组合中最大的部门,重量为25%。该公司在TMT部门的根源日期回到1974年,当时新加坡政府将淡马锡作为控股公司管理,以管理国有企业,包括新加坡电信。
Alibaba has also proved to be a winning investment for sovereigns including GIC, Khazanah, and China Investment Corp. But like Uber and so many other tech giants, its valuation is hotly disputed. Alibaba’s 2014 IPO was the largest in history, luring tech bears out of hibernation to talk about the perceived market bubble on cable news. Bubble or no bubble, a report published last year by SharesPost, which researches private market investments, estimated that roughly one in three unicorns in the U.S. will experience a drop in its valuation when it goes public or sells out.
That’s exactly what happened to Square. At first blush, it would appear that GIC got burned after it led a $150 million Series E round for the U.S. mobile card reader maker only to see the company’s valuation slashed in half at its IPO a year later. But the Series E–round investors had in place an IPO protection — known as a ratchet — that promised them additional shares if the company’s stock priced below $18.56 a share, for a guaranteed return of 20 percent in the event of an IPO. Moreover, Square’s share price is up 40 percent since the IPO.
所有这一切使得GIC看起来彻头彻尾的精明 - 几乎没有经验丰富的,深刻的深刻的君主,在它看到的第一个独角兽处肆无忌惮地投球。实际上,一些专家表示,已经证明了国有资金虽然向风险投资党迟到,但已被证明是相当复杂的投资者。正如FT Partners的McLaughlin看到它,主权财富基金都是愚蠢的钱。“我们对这些公司有很大的尊重,”他说。“我们发现人才和勤勉等级等于或大于一些已建立的资金。”
阿什比和尚,执行董事of Stanford’s Global Projects Center (and a columnist for亚博赞助欧冠;请参阅第32页)的“巨头大道”),同意这项评估,但警告大型机构的利益并不总是与私募股权和风险投资公司的普通伙伴的利益对齐。“他们并不愚蠢,”僧人说,他们为进入硅谷的主权资金提供咨询服务。“但他们正在走出他们的舒适区,并信任他们的GPS对他们来说,这并不总是如此。”
That concern may be among the reasonsNorway’s $930 billion Government Pension Fund Global, the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, has yet to enter the pre-IPO tech fray. Since establishing its rainy-day fund with excess oil revenue in 1996, the Norwegian government has kept private equity and unlisted stocks off-limits. Restricted to an ultraconservative mix of stocks, bonds, and real estate, Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), the arm of Norway’s central bank that oversees the fund, has explored innovations in passive investing but has grown discontented with sitting on 1.3 percent of all shares in listed companies around the globe.
这些天基金在少数民族。在机构投资者的主权投资者研究所的亚博赞助欧冠全球西部政府基金的一项民意调查最近可能发现,60%的出席资金已经投资风险投资。该样品代表了一个地理位置不同的投资者,24%来自资产超过1000亿美元的机构,额外的11%代表资金超过500亿美元。
“They’re missing out on an entire asset class,” says ARCH’s Nelsen of sovereign funds that don’t invest in private markets. “In a portfolio theory sense, as that asset class grows as a percentage of global wealth, they’re actually accepting more risk because they don’t have a balanced portfolio. And they’re left out of large segments of excess returns as the financial markets change.”
Those potential dangers are not lost on NBIM, which was forced to forgo an offer from Facebook for a pre-IPO investment. The firm’s executives have expressed dismay in the past about the slowdown in new corporate listings and their inability to access innovative and fast-growing companies, like Uber and Airbnb, that are staying private for longer.
“For the first time ever, we have a set of companies that have pushed off going public, and they’re raising capital when the companies are valued at tens of billions of dollars,” says Bessemer’s Colloton. “At any other prior period, those would’ve been public companies.”
在即将到来的纸张中Hastings Law Journal, Duke University associate law professor Elisabeth de Fontenay explains how booming private markets are sucking the life out of public markets. “No longer the promised land for companies poised to grow, the public stock market is quickly becoming a holding pen for massive, sleepy corporations,” de Fontenay writes.
Historically, the two main incentives for going public have been the ability to raise large amounts of capital and the ability to create liquidity for investors. But as sovereign wealth funds have gotten bolder and regulatory changes have allowed private equity and venture capital firms to get larger, more-innovative companies are putting off the day when they will tap public markets and subject themselves to the pressures of quarterly earnings targets.
“我们可以为具有验证技术的公司提供更大的财政支持,并帮助他们避免急于IPO,”阿布扎比投资机构的主要投资主管COLM Lanigan在2014年访谈中告诉主权财富中心。
虽然创造流动性仍然是私募股权和风险投资公司的一流,但最终需要销售公司或者以公众偿还投资者,但主权财富基金可能完全有不同的最终名。
“For the liquidity piece, sovereign wealth funds are playing a really significant role in the sense that they really don’t need an exit for a long time, and they may not want an exit for a long time,” Duke’s de Fontenay tellsII。“从那个角度来看,你有一些没有习惯存在的东西:一个巨大的股本资本,可以在不需要出口的情况下保持在很长一段时间内。”
Otherwise forced to reconcile low growth prospects in public markets to their boards, even the most conservative asset owners may be pressured into private markets. Norway’s Parliament has said it will consider letting its sovereign fund invest in private equity at the beginning of next year. Even if the fund’s private equity allocation was capped at 5 percent of its total portfolio, as its real estate allocation is, NBIM would have about $47 billion to put to work. Its sheer size would put it on equal footing with buyout heavyweights — Carlyle Group, for example, has $51 billion in assets in its corporate private equity division — but whether this unabashed index-investing enthusiast could hold its own against these rivals is an open question.
On the other hand, averaging real growth of just 3.79 percent a year since inception and short of its 4 percent target, Norway may have more to gain than it does to lose. That may well be what’s driving its peers to dive into private markets.
“I don’t understand this idea that public markets are somehow pure,” says ARCH’s Nelsen. “In the deals we do, our investors know way more about a company and all its gory details than any public investor would ever know.”
Jess Delaney是机构投资者主权财富中心的研究和数据负责人。亚博赞助欧冠