Wall Street lacks nano savvy
Last modified: April 2, 2004, 6:40 AM PST
By Reuters
Nanotechnology is well established at many tech companies, but Wall Street is just catching on to the money-spinning potential for the rapidly evolving field, industry watchers said this week.
Nanotech, which aims to build new materials by manipulating atoms and molecules, is "business as usual for us," Paolo Gargini, Intel's director of technology strategy, told a National Nanotechnology Initiative conference in Washington, D.C. this week.
Intel, for example, manufactures chips on a nano-scale--generally defined as the fabrication of things under 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
Other leading companies, including General Electric, 3M, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, are making substantial investments in the rapidly evolving field, experts said.
Nanotech is still mostly a technology in search of products--and investors--with research largely confined to government funded universities and companies looking for new products.
But unlike previous technology booms quickly embraced by Wall Street, such as biotechnology, computers and the Internet, nanotech investing hasn't hit the mainstream yet. That may be about to change, industry watchers said.
Merrill Lynch, for instance, said on Thursday it had created an American Stock Exchange quoted index of 25 companies that have a "significant percent of their future profits'' in nanotech. The index includes Intel and GE and small stocks like Nanophase and Harris & Harris.
"The serious money is only just beginning to understand nanotech,'' said Peter Conley, director of equity research at Los Angeles broker MDB Capital. He said MDB is one of a few brokerages with any focus on nanotech. Others are SG Cowen and Punk Ziegel.
That's a far cry from previous decades, when now-defunct brokerages like Robertson Stephens, Montgomery Securities and Hambrecht & Quist speedily fueled an investing boom into companies with no earnings but big prospects.
There are just a handful of publicly traded nanotech companies and only a few in the pipeline for initial public offerings.
Part of Wall Street's reticence may be that nanotech cuts across many industries, making it difficult to invest in "pure play'' companies, of which only a handful are public, experts said. According to one recent survey, the biggest areas of corporate nanotech investment are electronics, coatings and sensors, with less in automotive and life science products.
"Is there a killer app? Right now, there is not,'' said Sean Murdock, executive director of Chicago-based consultancy AtomWorks, quoting a common industry term for a lucrative technology application.
Still, the groundwork for a U.S. industry that will likely generate billions of dollars in revenue is well under way, although it could face serious competition from other countries, particularly Japan, which is heavily backing its budding nanotech industry, experts said.
The number of U.S. nanotech startups nearly doubled to 430 since 2001, according to industry figures compiled by AtomWorks. But the numbers of non-U.S. nanotech start-ups grew faster, to 403 in 2003 from 184 in 2001, it found.
"'Japan Inc.' has made a decision that it's going to lead here,'' said Murdock, warning that the United States could fall behind if immigration policies stop allowing trained workers from bringing the their talents to the United States. |
