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Wednesday, February 1, 2012

For Obama’s green-car revolution, fits and starts

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For Obama’s green-car revolution, fits and starts

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Carol D. Leonnig and Joe Stephens,

The Obama administration has poured roughly $5 billion in taxpayer funds into the electric-car industry, offering incentives to manufacturers, their suppliers and even car buyers who might want to go green.

But analysts say the risk is rising that taxpayers in many cases will not see a return on their money soon, if ever. Instead, they warn that some federally subsidized companies could be forced to shut down in coming months.

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?A California solar company backed by a half-billion dollars in loan guarantees from the Obama administration, announced it was shutting its doors and laying off 1,100 employees.

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For President Obama, who has made clean-technology investment a hallmark of his job creation efforts, troubles in the electric-car sector pose a potential new political problem after the collapse of solar-panel maker Solyndra, which recently defaulted on a half-billion-dollar federal loan after filing for bankruptcy. The administration has channeled an estimated $80 billion of the stimulus recovery effort into grants and loans to clean energy and energy efficiency programs, companies and research.

Obama predicted in 2008 that green cars would create thousands of new U.S. jobs as demand soared. But in recent months, production lines and sales expectations have been dramatically scaled back.

A123 Systems, a battery maker that received $380 million in government support, announced recently that declining orders had forced layoffs. Instead of up to 3,000 new Michigan jobs as Obama and the company had predicted, it now has 690 employees.

Battery maker EnerDel, recipient of a a $118 million federal grant, took a hit when its key customer, electric-car maker Think, declared bankruptcy this year. Johnson Controls, which received a $299 million stimulus grant, opted to build one factory instead of two because of lower-than-projected demand, a company official said, and that one is now operating at half capacity.

California electric-car maker Aptera announced it was shutting its doors because of problems raising capital. And General Motors — whose moderately priced Volt was supposed to drive Obama’s push for 1 million alternative vehicles by 2015 — revealed last week that it would fall roughly 38 percent shy of its goal of selling 10,000 Volts this year.

“Many in this industry have jumped the gun on how aggressive the growth of electric vehicles will be,” said Kevin C. See, an analyst at Lux Research.

Supporters of Obama’s green-car initiatives say that there are still industry bright spots and that this start-up sector will simply take longer to deliver results.

“Certainly, with electric-vehicle sales, we’re not on track to meet the president’s goal,” said Brendan Bell, clean-vehicle expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But .?.?. these investments are good ones toward that goal.”

Alex Molinaroli, a Johnson Controls vice president, said the funds give U.S. factories the capacity to deliver when demand arrives and position them as industry players.

“Is it worth the premium?” Molinaroli said. “We’ll have to wait a long time to see if this was a good investment or not.”

Obama’s green-car goal

Obama started his alternative-vehicle push in the 2008 campaign, and his administration soon after put money behind the plan. Like Solyndra, several of the firms receiving support had investors who were also important Obama campaign donors.

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Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Revolution Growth invests in Vienna-based FedBid

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Revolution Growth invests in Vienna-based FedBid

JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS - Washington entrepreneurs Steve Case (pictured) and Ted Leonsis have made the first big purchase with their $450 million Revolution Growth fund, acquiring a major stake in Vienna-based FedBid, which they hope to grow into an online marketplace for tens of billions of dollars in government procurement.

Text SizePrintE-mailReprints By Thomas Heath,

Washington entrepreneurs Ted Leonsis and Steve Case have made the first big investment with their $450 million Revolution Growth fund, acquiring a major stake in Vienna-based FedBid, which they hope to grow into an online marketplace for tens of billions of dollars in government procurement.

The investment was made less than two months after the two former AOL executives announced the formation of the fund, a private investment vehicle designed to reignite the high-tech, entrepreneurial culture that dominated Washington in the 1990s.

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Leonsis and Case would not disclose the amount of the investment, but sources familiar with the transaction who are not authorized to speak on the record, said the amount was about $25 million.

The deal closed Friday.

“We love that it’s a local company and that it is serving probably the biggest market there is,” said Leonsis, who will become FedBid’s chairman. “The federal government is the largest buyer of goods on the planet, and this is a big, vertical, e-commerce company being used to save the government lots of money and provide much more efficient delivery of services for the government.”

Revolution Growth is now the largest shareholder in the company and is placing two directors on the board: retired Gen. George Casey, the former Army chief of staff; and Washington entrepreneur Mark Walsh, co-founder and chief executive of GeniusRocket.

FedBid last year facilitated more than 20,000 transactions worth more than $1.4 billion, according to FedBid chief executive Ali Saadat, who owned most of the company until Revolution Growth’s investment.

FedBid collects a percentage of every transaction, which varies based on how much money the government saves.

More than 8,500 government agencies, from the State Department to Homeland Security, shop for everything from boots and uniforms to laptop computers and network services using FedBid. Approximately 45,000 private companies are registered to use the site.

“When you walk through the airport [security checkpoint], pretty much what you see .?.?. from [Transportation Security Administration] uniforms to trays, tables, all the hand-held scanning machines, was pretty much bought through FedBid,” said Saadat, who bought the company 10 years ago.

Saadat would not disclose FedBid’s revenue but said the company is profitable.

Leonsis said he heard of Saadat and FedBid a few years ago from a guest at a Capitals’ game. (Leonis owns the National Hockey League team.) He said he googled Saadat, read about FedBid “and just kind of stored it away in the back of my head as an executive I’d like to meet one day.”

Leonsis and Case will use the investment to grow FedBid’s revenue and expand into state and local government procurements. The number of employees is expected to increase from its current 130 to 200 by later this year.

“We want to do speed-up capital, where we will make an investment of size and help the entrepreneur break out and build a big, scalable company,” Leonsis said. “This is a company already on a path to do more than $2 billion on the top line and now [can] go into new markets like state and local government purchasing agents. We are going to provide the growth capital so the company can grow top-line revenues.”

Industry observers said the purchase was ambitious and interesting, but it may be difficult to get government bureaucracies to become as comfortable with online purchases as have millions of consumers.

“The question is: Is it perfectly timed, or is it a little bit ahead of its time?” said Morris Panner, a local software entrepreneur who sits on the board of the Software and Information Industry Association, which is based in the District.

“In my last company, we worked very actively with the federal government in participating in an app store,” Panner said. “It was a very frustrating experience because the procurement rules hadn’t kept up with the vision of a more agile purchasing system. The vision has outpaced the legislative and regulatory process.”

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