Web entity investment profiling

Inward investment is a huge global business. In a highly competitive world corporate business (both large and small) are setting up operations across borders to access new markets, to seek lower costs, and gain know-how.

This brings huge economic growth to the countries that attract foreign direct investment from around the world and national and regional investment promotion agencies are competing fiercely to identify and target potential foreign investors. The techniques used currently to identify potential foreign investors can be best described as primitive.

Even the most sophisticated practitioners in FDI marketing still rely on either basic quantitative indicators drawn from published accounts (rate of growth, profitability, cash reserves, R&D spend etc.) or qualitative information in the form of key words or phrases are drawn from web searches (new chief executive, takeover, press cuttings,, analyst reports etc.) to create a 'score' for a company that denotes its value as a potential inward investor.

At a time of continuing financial uncertainty in developed markets the ability to predict company growth could also have an even bigger application in the investment business. Working initially to support inward investment marketing the learning from BIWM supported data mining/predictive analytics process could offer the clear evidence needed to convince the investment community that a company's growth probability can be calculated within acceptable margins of error.

This project continues on the "web entity investment profiling" KTA project that ended in February 2011, there has been significant progress in regards to developing the idea further and identifying potential business opportunities. Currently it is believed that there is great potential to continue the efforts for pushing this idea even further, due to the increasing interest from investors and also clients.

The implementation of this system has been undertaken by Technotomy Ltd in collaboration with the Department of Computing, and is currently working on the development of the first produced prototype into a commercial application.