This week we saw two very different communities sharing their thoughts - the Finance Directors dinner and a group of new members for a Making the Most of Membership lunch.
The Finance Directors got together earlier this week to reflect on the benefits and costs of public listing, with insights from the London Stock Exchange and The Design Portfolio. Only 72 companies in East of England are publicly listed - a tiny proportion of the Cambridge high technology cluster of over 1,200 companies. In the last 2 years no companies listed publicly from Cambridge. The AIM listed companies have fallen from ~1,700 to ~1,200 in the last 2 years, mainly because companies are being acquired. For those companies that choose to list as ARM once did (ARM is now among the 50 most valuable companies in the FTSE) the costs of raising capital that way are generally around 10% of the amount raised. Yet 48 companies listed this year, compared to only 22 last year, including technology stocks like Promethean (who gave Apax a return on their investment) and Ocado. Once a company has listed, communications to stakeholders have to be much more formal and impressive, and both annual reports and interim results are very closely read. The chatter and gossip of Twitter feeds from the CEO and CTO that so much a backdrop to the high technology cluster have to flow through offical channels, and a well-structured website is also generally needed. Attendees included Finance Directors from publicly listed members (Cambridge Consultants,Unilever, Xaar) as well as many that are privately held (Amdeo, Biotica, Breathing Buildings, CamCon, DBA, Deloitte, Hypertag, IP.Access, LMK Thermosafe, Lectus Therapeutics, Mills & Reeve, Nujira, Plastic Logic, RealVNC, Sagentia, St Johns, Ubisense). Clearly even if a team anticipate a trade sale, they need to understand the costs and benefits of IPO to understand what a fair price could be. For this group of Finance Directors, skilled in the specifics of technology growth companies and responsible for anticipating the risks and needs of their organizations, the chance to talk to their peers informally over dinner was clearly welcome.
On Friday we got together to help prospective and existing members with Making the Most of Membership. This was a much broader group of individuals, including many from business development or administrative roles responsible for promoting their companies through Cambridge Network's website and events. We met members including AC Integration, Adder, Adept Scientific, AMI Software, Cambridge Science Park, Crescendo Biologics, Crucible, Curtiss-Wright, GTK UK, Humanitarian Centre, IP Asset, Kerio Technologies, Kesteven Law, Medimmune, Napp Pharma, Partnertech, Riverlite, Signify, ThermoFisher Scientific, Toby Churchill, University of Cambridge and around ten companies considering membership. Some of these are large listed companies, yet they still find the channel that Cambridge Network provides to the high technology cluster an efficent way to get out the news about their developments and find great people to help them with their plans.They all wanted to understand how to get their share of the ~10,000 webhits the site gets each day, and involve their colleagues in the right special interest groups to meet their peers.
High technology needs to marshall resources if it is to change the world - great people and the capital to pay them in particular. Clearly public listing is only a tiny fraction of the activity in the cluster. It's great to see so many good teams getting their story out through the Network - and we look forward to seeing you too this term.
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