THE Singapore government's plan for a co-investment fund to help home-based businesses make overseas acquisitions is more likely to launch targeted harpoons than to cast a wide but thin net.

Companies hoping that the spoils of the International Partnership Fund (IPF), which was unveiled in Monday's budget announcement, would be finely chopped and scattered across the landscape might be disappointed. But if the fund means to bring maximum value to its investments in a commercially viable way, that will have to be the case.

Only a few details have been revealed so far. The fund will have an initial injection of up to S$600 million, and will be managed by Temasek Holdings' Heliconia. It will co-invest only with companies with a revenue of at most S$800 million. The purpose is to help Singapore companies "scale up and internationalise". In the absence of specifics, the industry has speculated about how the fund would be run and structured.