Most Companies Plan to Ramp Up Strategic Cleantech Investments

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Around 75 percent of international companies plan to increase their investments in clean technology ventures, according to a new report by Ernst & Young that polled 300 companies across all sectors.

Just under half of the companies said they would spend more than $50 million investing in clean technology ventures, while 12 percent said they would spend more than $250 million in clean technology companies. More than 75 percent of the companies that responded expect the research and development focus for their clean technology ventures to grow.

Many companies have investment arms that are charged with finding companies that can generate a return on an investment, rather than make a strategic investment. For example, Google has Google Ventures and Salesforce typically invests in some startups. The report indicates that a lot of these companies are moving from investments for the sake of generating a return to strategic investments — meaning they can find some use out of the technology each company they invest in produces.

The companies that responded to the survey expect to spend 40 percent of their investments on research and development of clean technology that they can apply to their own services. Around one fifth of the companies said they would be increasing their investments in clean technology ventures as a way to make money rather than reduce their costs and generate good will by reducing their environmental impact.

Almost 75 percent of the companies polled by Ernst & Young also said they would make a clean technology acquisition in the next year if they had not already made one. Those same companies planned to make the purchases to reduce their costs and increase efficiency. General Electric's acquisition of Converteam is a good example of that — it picked up the company to improve the efficiency of its power transmission.

The companies involved in the survey all had more than $1 billion in revenue. About half of the companies that responded were in the Americas, while 29 percent were in Europe and 25 percent were in Asia/Pacific. More than half of the actual respondents were chief executives or other C-level officials (such as a chief technology officer or a chief information officer.)

Tags: clean technology, strategic investment

Companies: Ernst & Young

By EDWARD WYATT 06 Apr, 2011

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Source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=11dabe58c36d4179b29fbee6b32299c3
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