Press Release
C-star Interview | Nicolas Du Cray, Partner of Cathay Innovation
2019-05-30
Interview with Nicolas Du Cray, Partner of Cathay Innovation
Q1: What do you think of Cathay Capital?
We are a global investment platform that invests in technology start-ups and innovation all over the world. We’re active in the US, we’re active in Europe, we’re active in China, and we also have partnership in Africa and are looking (partnership) at Southeast Asia. We do venture capital investment in innovative companies.
Q2: What are the vision and value of Cathay?
As an investor, actually we have access to industrial resources. For example, in retail and brands and industries, because some large company invested in our funds and we have these companies work with start-ups, we also have the start-ups we work with to work better with these large companies. We, as an investor, our goal is to be concretely supporting our portfolio in their cooperation with corporates.
Q3: What elements will Cathay consider before investment?
It’s a matter of assessing the competitive advantage of the company, its ability to grow, its turnover and to reach profitability at some point, to use technology and the scale of the use of technology to a large number of users and also to be able to work with large companies to make them innovative.
Q4: Among all the invested companies, which one do you think is the most promising? Why?
So far, our best investment has been the social commerce platform for Pinduoduo which has been very successful in China. It went public on NASDAQ last summer and besides this large e-commerce company, we also have invested in human resource management software and some smartphone IOT software.
Q5: Which industry will Cathay pay attention to in the near future?
So, the big subject of a new retail, as a revolution of retail, e-commerce remain an very important subject for us, because we believe actually technology can really enhance the operation of retailers and provide access to players, to brands. So new retail is going to (be) improved significantly thanks to technology, not only at the point of sale but also on the whole value chain.
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