There is money!
Investors are looking for projects
At the Round table "Money for Growth: from Development Institutions to direct investment and debt financing", which was held on March 15 as part of SmartPlace Industrial, the hall was packed to capacity. Investors, entrepreneurs and representatives of science came to a meeting with the heads of large funds, support institutions and infrastructure in order not only to get acquainted with the existing tools for financing projects at early stages, but also to find out why not all tools work as we would like.
The round table was attended by Mikhail Makarov, Deputy Director of the Industrial Development Fund; Natalia Podsosonnaya, General Director of Savings and Investments Management Company CJSC; Lyubov Simonova, Leading Expert of Almaz Capital Partners; Lyudmila Golubkova, Managing Partner of Start Capital IC CJSC; Igor Bliznyukov, Commercial Director of Go to Market GmbH"; Igor Pivovarov, CEO of New Plasma Technologies LLC; Peter Lemke, Partner of DIERKES, LEMKE & PARTNER; Kendrick White, Advisor to the Rector for International Innovation of Lobachevsky Nizhny Novgorod State University.
A lot of efforts have been made recently to build a working investment elevator in Russia and, it would seem, there is a certain tangible result in the form of a developed infrastructure – business angels, funds, development institutions ready to invest in companies at all stages and "pass" them to each other as a baton for subsequent rounds. But in practice it turns out that only the willingness of investors to work with companies is noticeably lacking.
On the one hand, the Russian early-stage market, according to Igor Pivovarov, CEO of New Plasma Technologies LLC, is not fully invested at least 20 times. He was supported by other participants of the discussion. The market needs to be saturated with a huge amount of money – in order for the investment elevator to work as a model, so that as a result, global industry leaders grow out of thousands of companies through investment "selection". Now, as Mikhail Tsygankov, Director for Key Partners of the Space Technologies and Telecommunications Cluster of the Skolkovo Foundation, said, talking about the "elevator", by and large, does not make sense: companies "sit each on their own floor, and it is unclear what kind of movement is happening" – and the situation has not changed for the last ten years.
On the other hand, according to the audience, one of the pressing problems is the lack of high-quality projects. Lyubov Simonova, a leading expert at Almaz Capital Partners, noted in her speech that "out of 5,000 projects that the fund's experts consider annually, only 4-5 are invested." "The problem is," says Natalia Podsosonnaya, General Director of Savings and Investments Management Company CJSC, "that the seeding stage is mainly taken by teams that are difficult to call "project". Most often these are university, institute or simply "engineering and applied amateurs" teams. Such teams in the community are often called "grant-making": they go to development institutes, take money from year to year, work out a contract, and at the exit they receive a semi-finished product that is not ready to enter the market. The market is sorely lacking entrepreneurs whose competencies could turn an idea or development into a working business.
Another problem is the lack of ambition of Russian projects. "Unfortunately, people in Russia don't want to go anywhere. They don't even want to go anywhere from their small town," Lyubov Simonova said. Often it does not matter how brilliant a business project is in its essence, if, for example, it restricts its activities to the region and does not pretend to scalability - many funds do not undertake such projects simply because of the specifics of their investment strategy.
However, scalability is not everything. There are not enough stories of technology introduction into production on the Russian market. Many companies simply do not understand that when developing a product, it is necessary to go from the market: when presenting their project to a potential client, they discover that the product is not in demand. Without a clearly defined technical task by the industry, the project can turn into "development for the sake of development". In addition, technology entrepreneurs, even those who clearly understand their market, often have no idea how they will integrate into the technological cycles of large businesses and corporations – their consumers. In fairness, it should be noted that the point here is not only the incompetence of entrepreneurs, but also that enterprises often carefully guard the "secrets" of their production processes. This is a separate problem that urgently needs to be solved.
The participants of the Round Table agreed that in a market economy, all participants of the "investment elevator" should actively master and establish communication with each other. According to Lyudmila Golubkova, Managing Partner of CJSC IC "Starta Capital": "If you believe in your project, and your project really has good prospects, then you can find your own, private investor."
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25.03.2016