Tesi’s Impact Review 2020: Helping Finnish SMEs through the corona pandemic
Although the year 2020 was extraordinary, Tesi successfully continued to raise Finland to the forefront of transformative economic growth by investing and producing insightful data that support the Finnish venture capital and private equity market. To help the SMEs negatively impacted by the pandemic, we established stabilisation and Venture Bridge financing instruments.
“In 2020, the focus of Tesi’s responsibility and impact activities was on helping Finnish SMEs through the corona crisis. We also continued our normal investment operations throughout the year to ensure the growth and internationalisation of those Finnish companies with a positive societal impact. This objective was supported by the higher-than-anticipated investment activity by VC & PE investors as well as by Finnish companies adapting better than expected to the challenging circumstances,” comments Tesi’s CEO Jan Sasse.
Personnel and the customer priorities in the development of corporate responsibility
Yearly, Tesi inquires the state of corporate responsibility in its portfolio companies. Although the relative number of companies with corporate responsibility targets has fallen in 2020, the companies with set targets have identified more of them.
- 75% of respondents have at least one development target (84% last year)
- 43% have a written corporate responsibility policy (46% last year)
- Women present in 61% of management teams (55% last year)
- Women present in 41% of boards (37% last year)
- CO2-emissions calculated in 13 % of respondents (6% last year)
Tesi’s aim at growth and internationalisation of Finnish companies
Societal impact and responsibility, market-conform and profitable operations form the core of Tesi’s investment activities. Tesi offers financing to market bottlenecks as a minority investor that co-operates with other market players to increase the supply of private capital in Finland.
In 2020, Finnish growth companies received EUR 520 million, of which EUR 171 million was international capital, through Tesi and co-investors. Tesi made investments totalling EUR 248 million, the two temporary crisis financing instruments included with a share of EUR 71 million.
In 2020, we also conducted three questionnaire surveys of the situation Finnish SMEs were facing due to the pandemic (available in Finnish only). The results indicate that these companies were handling the crisis with lower-than-expected negative effects. Our VC & PE market pulse surveys support that observation. The continuing ability of companies and owners to adapt and raise follow-on financing amid the crisis has indeed been encouraging.
Scroll down for the document, please.
Additional information:
Jan Sasse, CEO, Tesi
+358 40 861 9151
jan.sasse@tesi.fi
Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd) is a state-owned investment company that wants to raise Finland to the front ranks of transformative economic growth by investing in funds and directly in companies. We invest profitably and responsibly, hand-in-hand with co-investors, to create the world’s new success stories. Our investments under management total 1.9 billion euros. www.tesi.fi | @TesiFII
