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Entries from Saturday, December 31. 2005

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Saturday, December 31. 2005

2005 venture capital investments in Europe

As reported in Tornado Insider in a Sneak peek of 2005 venture capital investment in Europe

the following trends can be seen for 2005 venture capital investments in Europe. All of them are unsurprising. Also no change in the fact that Europe has about the same number of venture capitalists (if you compare the EVCA and NVCA memberships) but much less money to invest per VC. Surprising to us still the fact that although the European economy is about the same size (in GDP) as the US, it falls far behind the US in total VC investments. (about 3.5 billion EUR as compared to the expected 21 billion USD in the US). One trend we expect as well is that US VCs are going to take over European funds and increase their global presence. Of course their focus will remain the US, followed by China and India.

Total investment seems to have grown slightly compared with 2004.
The number of funded companies went down considerably from 825 in 2004 to only 750.
As a result, the average deal size climbed from €4.3 million to €4.6 million in 2005.
157 tech companies bagged a total of €628 million
in early-stage financing, representing a significant drop from the 211
startups (€801 million raised) in 2004. So investors are still shying away from early-stage startups.
The top 3 countries remained the same in 2005,
with the UK in an unchallenged number one position, followed by Germany
and France respectively
Denmark and the Netherlands had good increases, while Ireland saw less investment money pouring in.

Posted by Ralf Haller in ICT Tech/Market News at 08:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Sphere It

UK leads in broadband connections in Europe

http://www.point-topic.com/content/dslanalysis/ukbb051229.htm

"The UK has now overtaken France as the biggest broadband
country in Europe - although the gap is still narrow. This is according
to estimates by Point Topic which suggest that the UK will have 9.8
million broadband lines by New Year's Day 2006, while France will have
9.7 million."

Third is Europe's largest country by population and economy, Germany. I guess the news should have been: "Germany falls further behind in broadband connectivity."

Furthermore, this lead has been achieved in large part in 2005 alone, when there have been many more broadband lines installed in the UK than in France and Germany. This trend is expected to continue in 2006.