BY STEVEN JACKSON

Business Writer

jacksons@jamaicaobserver.com

MAYBERRY Investments plans to broker financing for fast-growing companies for which revenue has past the $100-million mark.

The near-bank is targeting entities that are seeing sales grow at 30 per cent a year.

The ‘$100-million club’ companies are too small to list on the Junior Market but are amongst the fastest- growing islandwide. Mayberry sees an opportunity to earn fees on the “backend” by helping them raise expansion cash.

“A $100-million [company] doesn’t necessary translate to you being able to list or raise a corporate paper, but we are helping companies get the necessary capital to move forward,” said Tania Waldron-Gooden, Mayberry’s senior vice-president, corporate finance.

To raise awareness, Mayberry placed full-page adverts in both national papers on Wednesday with the tagline, ‘Is your company in the $100 million club?’.

Waldron-Gooden believes such companies have the propensity to grow but fail because they do not know how to access capital, the type of capital to access, and how to get ready to access the capital.

The investment outfit doesn’t plan on injecting its own capital into these companies and the current drive to sensitise small businesses towards raising capital is not linked to a $1-billion fund set aside to get companies listed on the Junior Market, in which Mayberry has been a major player – it was lead broker for 11 of the 16 listings.

Like other financial services companies, the National Debt Exchange earlier this year cut projected earnings for Mayberry, which reported a write-off of unamortised premiums of $337.5 million in the company’s income statement.

The company’s drive into investment banking, asset management and trading should mitigate the losses due to the debt swap.

For the three months to June 30, Mayberry made $47.9 million in net profit, representing a 32 per cent increase over year-earlier levels. The company held $3.68 billion in shareholder equity up to end of June.