Puls Biznesu: ARIA during pandemic? It sounds great!
Investing during the pandemic, technology adoption in a crisis, market trends, performance of portfolio companies, Puls Biznesu devotes an extensive article to Dariusz Lewandowski and ARIA, in which the fund manager comments on the current situation in the financial market and more broadly in the economy.
– The pandemic has not changed our general investor optics and perception of macro trends. On the contrary, it highlighted those trends that we had already set our sights on a few years earlier and which our strategy is supposed to follow – says Dariusz Lewandowski in the pages of Puls Biznesu.
Which trends are at stake? Digitalization, personalization, sustainability. The newspaper reminds us that ARIA invests in companies operating in B2B areas in the SaaS model, cybersecurity, industrial innovation, artificial intelligence, MedTech, and EdTech. The global value of these markets reaches $670 billion, or more than PLN 2.5 trillion. Thus, in the era of pandemics, ARIA has invested in Sundose, a company offering personalized D2C supplements, and in Inuru, a manufacturer of ultra-thin OLED screens.
The good condition of ARIA’s technology portfolio results from the fund’s investment policy. The key is to properly define the relationship between risk and the expected rate of return. Dariusz Lewandowski says in the article that ARIA’s portfolio companies at the time of investment had a working product, generated at least a few million PLN of revenue, and were increasing sales. “The revenues of the slowest-growing ARIA-owned company increased by 30 percent during the pandemic, the best – by almost 600 percent,” notes Puls Biznesu. Now several more companies are on ARIA’s radar. The transactions may take place within the next 3 months.
“The head of ARIA is convinced that it is increasingly necessary to combine the technology segment with the traditional one,” writes Puls Biznesu. Now there is a chance to do it. “Any crisis accelerates the adoption of technology. Just look at the domestic e-commerce industry, which according to PwC grew by 36% during the pandemic. If someone didn’t take e-commerce seriously before and didn’t make a change during the pandemic, their future was in great question,” concludes Dariusz Lewandowski.
Full article at link.