London’s Alternative Investment Market has long been touting itself as a home for smaller cleantech businesses, and it has had a great deal of success in attracting companies involved in fuel cells, wind, solar, biofuels and so on (partly as a result of the draconian, and expensive, Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that makes it difficult for small firms to float in the US). However, in Europe, larger cleantech businesses tend to favour exchanges away from the UK – like Euronext, Frankfurt and Madrid – reflecting the fact that clusters of companies from a particular cleantech sector, such as solar, tend to operate in countries where those stock markets reside. Also, other firms can become attracted to a stock market precisely because of its reputation in playing host to a particular sector, even if they themselves have little presence in the country. An example of this is an Australian solar firm I met recently that is listed on the Frankfurt exchange, while AIM established a reputation for fuel cells companies a few years ago.
Of course, the fact that certain firms tend to favour stock markets in countries where they operate and sell their products is not a new observation. However, the two geothermal companies I met in Reno – Magma Energy and Ram Power – have floated on the Toronto Stock Exchange, yet their operations are mainly focused in the US and Latin America. Also, although the TSX already had one or two geothermal firms listed before the arrival of Magma and Ram, it does not – at least, not yet – have a huge reputation for geothermal companies.
But it seems that certain types of investors are more amenable to the kinds of risks that are part and parcel of the geothermal industry, and those investors have a background in buying resources businesses involved in mining and oil (major sectors on the TSX). Geothermal exploration has a lot in common with the mining and oil industries, in that it is necessary to find the right combination of geological factors to be able to build a commercial geothermal plant, and it is quite possible to spend millions of dollars drilling a geothermal well before coming up with nothing.
US investors might be the people to approach with a funky new battery technology for electric vehicles, or some other cleantech application that can be sold in its millions to consumers, but when it comes to exploration risk it is better to raise funds on stock markets where investors are already familiar with such an issue.
Meanwhile, I can think of a couple of other destinations, apart from TSX, for geothermal companies: AIM and the Australian Stock Exchange.
Jon Mainwaring
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
