About this time last year, I put together a few predictions and readers chimed in with theirs.  How did we all do?

 

Question 1:  How far will U.S. cleantech venture dollars drop from 1H08 to 1H09? 

I wrote it could be as high as 40%.  I argued that what was going to go completely missing were the mega-deals, and that on a dollar basis at least those made up a significant chunk, around 40% of quarterly tallies. Readers voted for a drop, but totaling less than a third on a dollar basis.

Well, according to the Cleantech Group's tallies, in 1H08 the total North American disclosed venture capital tally was $2.9B, and for 1H09 it was down around $1.6B.  Which is a 45% drop... 

 

Question 2:  How much, if at all, will the # of U.S. cleantech venture deals drop, 1H08 to 1H09? 

My argument was that the number of deals would probably drop, but by a lot less than the dollar amounts, as investors still did follow-on rounds but backed mostly away from the mega-deals.  I pegged the drop in the number of U.S. deals at around 20%.  Whereas CI readers tended to believe in a drop in the number of deals, but by less than 20%. 

In 1H08, the Cleantech Group counted 136 total North American venture deals.  In 1H09, the total was 139.  So the number of deals was indeed pretty flat!  But obviously the average size per round went way down.

Interestingly, it wasn't because of any significant shift in stage preference, i.e., investors didn't shift back to earlier stage in any significant way.  In 1H08 seed and first round were 32% of the North American total number of rounds, and in 1H09 they were 31%.  Investors still dramatically favored later stage deals.  They just weren't putting so much into them.  In fact, the mean size (sorry, I don't have median readily available) of disclosed "Follow-On" rounds in this data set dropped from $31.1M to $16.5M.

 

Question 3:  How much will cleantech dollars into China rise, 1H08 to 1H09?

I suggested they could rise 25%.  CI readers agreed with a rise, but were split as to whether it would be more or less than 25%.

We've got a bit of a data availability issue, as CG only started tracking China deals in 2Q08, and so we're missing 1Q08 data.  However, it's enough to show that the dollar amounts did in fact drop -- 2Q08 alone saw $257M, but 1H09's tally was only $170M.

 

Question 4:  What will be the "hot" sector in 1H09?

Of course, such an undefined question is tough to answer, but CI readers pointed most to energy efficiency and solar as the two most likely categories.  I'd said that solar was going to have to see a retrenchment, and that energy efficiency seemed most poised for growth.

Since the CG's sectoral definitions don't overlap well with my own (they bundle in biofuels and batteries together under the "Transportation" tag, for instance), it's a bit tough to make a definitive statement about how accurate everyone was in their predictions.  However, it is notable that solar dropped from being around 35-40% of venture dollars as it had been throughout 2008, down to a low of 13% share in 2Q09 (before rebounding back up to a 28% share in 3Q09).

Meanwhile, that amorphous "Transportation" category grew to rival the solar sector in terms of share of venture dollars.  So I suppose that means it's a likely candidate for "hot sector", although drilling down into it we see a healthy mix in there of everything from EVs and hybrids to batteries to biofuels.  Still, if 2008 was the year of solar, perhaps 2009 was the year of cars.

 

In another post, we'll have to do another prediction survey.  This was a pretty useful exercise.