Investigating the Motivations of VC Syndication in China --- Do Chinese Leading VC Firms Make a Difference in Terms of Syndication Decisions

The venture capital industry in China is quickly evolving and becoming more and more important in the development of small and medium-size companies in China. Venture capital firms usually invest in young private transactions which are usually involved with high risk. In addition, the legal and political environments in China are significantly different from those in the developed markets and at the same time, China is undergoing significant changes of business environments, which brings even more challenges to the VC firms in China’s market. Under these challenges, syndication has become a very popular investment method for the VC companies to diversify their investment risks. In this paper, we explore the various factors that might influence the motivation of VC firm’s syndication decisions in China’s market and especially focus on the impact of the firm’s Chinese ownership. We believe that VC firms’ Chinese ownership has a significant influence on the firm’s decision for syndication investment and our empirical analysis confirms this. We find that Chinese VC firms have a significantly lower likelihood to make syndicated investment than their foreign counterparties. We also explore the interactions between the firms’ Chinese ownership and other influencing factors to investigate their joint impacts on the syndication likelihood. We believe our study will provide a better and thorough understanding about the VC firms’ syndication behavior in China’s market and thus will offer significant values to Chinese policy makers in terms of their efforts to promoting VC development in China.