There were 60 investments in Chinese mobile Internet services, totaling $129 million, in the first quarter of 2013, according to a report released by Zero2IPO Research.
Ni Zhengdong, CEO of Zero2IPO, shared his insights at the third summit on China mobile Internet sector organized by Zero2IPO. The reason that 2011 was the best year in terms of the total amount was it was very easy to raise funding back then and venture capital was investing like crazy. The total amount in investment in the fisrt quarter of this year isn’t big, he pointed out, the total number of cases increased a lot.
Investments in China Mobile Internet Market
Source: Zero2IPO Research
From 2012 to H12013, of the total 152 cases, 57% were A round, 18% B round and 5% C round. 51% of the total amount of investments disclosed went to A rounds, 21% to B rounds.
67% of the total was injected into startups. That’s 78% of cases.
In the same period of time, 55% of cases were in RMB and 35% in USD (The rest were not disclosed). When it comes to the total amount, 59% was in RMB and 41% in USD. That means, according to Mr. Ni, Chinese funds are also interested in mobile Internet. It’s not that only USD funds such as Sequoia and IDG are investing in the sector. A considerable part of investments in RMB is from Chinese angel investors, Ni added.
From 2008 till now, only nine companies in mobile Internet sector went public. Four are listed on US markets, one is on the Main Board of HKSE, and the rest are on GEM of Shenzhen Stock Exchange. Ourpalm (SZ:300315) was the only one that went public in 2012. There are 216 companies, however, that were acquired in the past years.