墨西哥初创公司浪潮

Business

商业

Technology -- The Mexican wave

科技——墨西哥浪潮

At long last, Mexico is enjoying a startup bonanza.

墨西哥初创企业终于迎来了财运。

Kavak, a Mexican startup, provides an elegant solution to a glaring problem: how to buy a used vehicle in a market that is both one of the world’s biggest and its most informal second-hand car markets.

墨西哥初创企业Kavak为一个明显的痛点提供了一个精妙的解决方案：如何在一个全球最大、也最不正规的二手车市场购买二手车。

Few buyers trust a seller’s assessment of the good’s quality.

很少有买家相信卖方对商品质量的评估。

Few sellers trust the buyer to cough up the money.

很少有卖家相信买方会掏钱。

Transactions often involve “meeting someone at a corner store and seeing how it goes”, says Alejandro Guerra, Kavak’s general manager in Mexico.

Kavak在墨西哥的总经理亚历杭德罗·圭拉说，交易通常涉及“在街角的商店里与某人见面，看看进展如何”。

On Kavak’s app people can buy and sell cars with the company acting as a trusted middleman.

在Kavak的应用程序上，人们可以在公司作为值得信赖的中间人的情况下买卖汽车。

Kavak, which last month raised $700m in a funding round that valued it at $8.7bn, is part of a startup explosion in Mexico.

Kavak是墨西哥初创企业爆发式增长的一部分。该公司在上个月的一轮融资中筹得7亿美元，对其估值为87亿美元。

Since the firm became the first Mexican startup to be valued at more than $1bn last year it has been joined by three more such “unicorns”.

自去年该公司成为首家估值超过10亿美元的墨西哥初创公司以来，又有三家这样的“独角兽公司”加入了该行列。

So far this year unlisted Mexican tech firms have raised nearly $3bn, roughly as much as in the previous nine years combined.

今年迄今为止，未上市的墨西哥科技公司已获融资近30亿美元，大致相当于此前9年的总和。

Mexico’s 126m people are on average young and almost in the upper-middle-income bracket.

墨西哥的1.26亿人口平均来讲比较年轻，几乎属于中上收入阶层。

Some 54% own a smartphone, according to Newzoo, a research firm, a slightly higher share than among similarly novelty-loving Brazilians.

根据研究公司Newzoo的数据，约54%的人拥有智能手机，这一比例略高于同样热爱新奇事物的巴西人。

Mexico is among the five biggest markets for tech stars like Uber in ride-hailing or Spotify in music-streaming.

墨西哥是打车软件优步和音乐流媒体Spotify等科技明星企业的五大市场之一。

It is a huge one for Rappi, a Colombian food-delivery darling.

对于哥伦比亚的外卖宠儿Rappi来说，墨西哥是一个巨大的市场。

Until recently, though, domestic founders struggled to make a name for themselves.

不过，直到最近，国内创始人们仍在努力让自己成名享誉。

That is in large part because of a dearth of money.

这在很大程度上是因为资金匮乏。

Mexican entrepreneurs had to go cap in hand to local venture capitalists with comparatively shallow pockets.

墨西哥企业家不得不向财力相对较弱的当地风险资本家卑躬屈膝。

This began to change in 2019, when SoftBank launched a LatinAmerica fund.

这种情况在2019年开始改变，当时软银推出了一只拉美基金。

In September the free-spending Japanese technology-investment group announced a second fund of $3bn, bringing its total investments in the region to $8bn, a lot of it in Mexico.

今年9月，这家挥金如土的日本科技投资集团宣布了第二只30亿美元的基金，使其在该地区的总投资达到80亿美元，其中大量投资在墨西哥。

Others have been piling in, including Sea, a Singaporean tech conglomerate, Founders Fund, a prominent Silicon Valley venture-capital (VC) firm, and Tiger Global, an aggressive New York hedge fund that has recently been shaking up the VC world.

其他公司纷纷涌入，包括新加坡科技集团Sea，硅谷著名风险投资公司Founders Fund，以及最近撼动风投界的激进纽约对冲基金Tiger Global。

This money has been pouring into home-grown businesses that, like Kavak, solve what Philipp Haugwitz of McKinsey, a consultancy, calls “pain points” in Mexico -- of which there are plenty, from horrible traffic to a lumbering financial sector.

这些资金源源不断地涌入像Kavak这样的本土企业，解决了麦肯锡咨询公司的菲利普·豪维茨所说的墨西哥的“痛点”——痛点繁多，从糟糕的交通状况到步履蹒跚的金融业。

With just one in three Mexicans owning a bank account, loans hard to get and too many businesses cash-only, fintech startups in particular are thriving, in part thanks to a fintech law from 2018.

墨西哥只有三分之一的人拥有银行账户，贷款很难获得，而且很多企业只使用现金，这些现状使得金融科技行业的初创企业发展尤其蓬勃，这在一定程度上要归功于2018年出台的一项金融科技法律。

According to Fintech Radar, an industry newsletter, Mexico now boasts more fintechs than Brazil, the historic hub of Latin American enterprise.

据行业通讯《金融科技雷达》报道，墨西哥现在拥有比巴西更多的金融技术，巴西在历史上曾是拉美企业中心。

Albo, a digital-only “neobank”, makes it easy to set up an account.

Albo是一家仅提供数字化服务的“新银行”，它使开户变得很容易。

Clip offers credit-card readers for smartphones.

Clip为智能手机提供信用卡读卡器。

GBM makes loans to smaller businesses without credit histories.

GBM向没有信用记录的小企业提供贷款。

Kavak helps to finance transactions on its platform.

Kavak帮助为其平台上的交易融资。

Obstacles remain.

障碍仍然存在。

Like many startups, Mexican ones face a hazy path to profitability.

和许多创业公司一样，墨西哥的创业公司也面临着一条不明朗的盈利之路。

Dealing with bureaucracy is a nightmare; it can take Kavak days to process a transaction in Mexico, compared with under 40 minutes in Brazil.

与官僚机构打交道是一场噩梦；Kavak在墨西哥处理一笔交易可能需要几天时间，而在巴西则需要不到40分钟。

Yet investors are upbeat.

然而，投资者仍持乐观态度。

Marcelo Claure, who heads SoftBank’s Latin American fund, calls Mexico “the land of opportunity”.

软银拉美基金负责人马塞洛·克劳尔称墨西哥是“机遇之地”。

It has helped his fund’s returns exceed those in every other region, he says.

他说，这帮助他的基金获得了超过其他所有地区的回报。

And what works in Mexico may work in other emerging markets.

并且，在墨西哥行得通的方法可能在其他新兴市场也行得通。

Kavak, which expanded to Argentina last year and Brazil this year, is now eyeing those across the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Kavak去年扩张到了阿根廷，今年又扩张到了巴西，现在它正着眼于太平洋和大西洋对岸的国家。