An Analysis of Venture Firms’ Growth in Korea: Focusing on the Differences between ‘Venture Certification Types’

‘Venture firms’ in Korea are the firms who are certified as ‘venture’, whose certification types are defined by a law (‘Special Law for the Support of Venture Firms’), and therefore encompass not only the venture capital-financed companies, which are usually regarded as ventures in USA and European countries, but also other types of firms such as R&D-intensive firms and the firms with financial guarantee or loans through technology evaluation (‘technology finance or loan firms’). This paper examines the differences in the Korean venture firms’ growth between the venture certification types. For the empirical analysis, this paper uses the lists of venture-certified firms from 1998 to 2010 which are then linked with their financial data in Korea Enterprises Database (KED). According to the results of empirical analyses, the companies in the ‘venture capital-financed firms’ type show greater growth rate in sales and the number of regular employees 3 and 5 years after first venture certification than the firms in type of ‘technology finance/loan firms’. Moreover, the newly certified companies in ‘R&D-intensive firms’ type are also showing faster growth than the ‘technology finance/loan firms’ since 2003 where the venture industry has undergone a consolidation phase after the blast of so-called ‘IT venture bubble’ in 2001~2002. These results imply that the so-called ‘venture firms’ in Korea are composed with heterogeneous firm groups with different characteristics and that the companies selected through market mechanism (‘venture capital-financed firms’) outperforms the companies selected on the basis of policy interests (‘technology finance/loan firms’) in terms of the growth in sales and employment. On the basis of these findings, this paper suggests that the current venture-support policy should consider the different policy demands of firms across the type of venture certification more actively and that should refocus the objective of policies on facilitating venture capital market rather than emphasizing the nominal increase in the number of venture-certified firms