Francesco Bugugnoli

  • Home
  • Author: Francesco Bugugnoli

Bridging the valuation canyon

Why we launched the GCI Leap Capital Growth Fund When we launched GCI’s Leap Capital Growth Fund in November 2019, our goal was simple. We wanted to provide founders and early shareholders of emerging fast-growing companies with an alternative funding option. Typically, scale-up businesses would seek to raise equity from what was at that point still a relatively small number of late-stage Venture Capital or growth equity providers – and suffer the dilution that inevitably came with that. The only other alternative was to sacrifice their growth ambitions, fund their business out of operating cash flows and grow more conservatively […]
Read more

Finding balance in the valuation gap

Like many people in the Australian business community, a number of us at GCI start our day with the Australian Financial Review (AFR). Last Friday, these words in an article by James Thomson caught our attention: “but in an uncertain world, the question of what is fair value looms large”. In this piece, Thomson was highlighting the widening “valuation gap” between purchaser and vendor expectations in the current market. At GCI, this is a question we continually ask ourselves as we fund acquisitions of both businesses and assets, and work with companies to restructure their balance sheets – so how do we […]
Read more

Is the great Aussie dream turning into a nightmare for some?

With inflation and interest rates on the rise, lenders are increasingly scrutinising expenses such as home ownership when assessing borrower risks, reducing access to credit for many consumers and small businesses. Home ownership has traditionally been seen as the great Australian dream and has traditionally be seen as a positive when underwriting unsecured consumer or small business credit. However, the risk off mentality in the current economic environment of rising inflation and rising interest rates is having a marked impact on a lenders view of risk and specifically how home ownership should be considered in a risk assessment. Until recently […]
Read more

The ‘ATO Bank’ is Closing for Business

Recent months have seen an increase in speculation as to whether we are seeing the first signs of distress appear in corporate Australia. Whilst the construction industry has laid bare its woes with the collapse of construction giant ProBuild and others, the cracks are appearing in several sectors, particularly where price increases cannot be passed on to the end customer.  We are reminded of the 2010 movie “Margin Call“, which portrays an unnamed US investment bank heavily invested in collateralised debt obligations (CDOs).  The bank’s chairman, played by Jeremy Irons, speaking to his assembled lieutenants in the middle of the […]
Read more