Profits in the billions – and no end in sight. Business at Biontech is going well. The shareholders can look forward to substantial price increases.
A year ago Biontech was still in the red, but now the Mainz-based company is booming profits thanks to its corona vaccine.
As the company announced on Monday, the net profit rose in the past quarter to almost 2.8 billion euros after a loss of 88.3 million euros in the same period of the previous year. For the first six months, the surplus amounted to a good 3.9 billion euros after a loss of almost 142 million euros in the previous year.
Quarterly sales jumped from 41.7 million euros to around 5.3 billion euros within one year. For the first half of the year, total sales came to almost 7.4 billion euros. With this development in the back, Biontech screwed up its forecast for vaccine sales to 15.9 billion euros. Three months ago, the company had assumed 12.4 billion euros.
Together with its US partner Pfizer, Biontech has now delivered around one billion doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to more than 100 countries or regions worldwide (as of July 21). CEO and Biontech co-founder Ugur Sahin was proud that this “milestone” had been reached after a few months.
For this year, the two companies say they have fixed supply agreements for more than 2.2 billion cans and another billion cans for the coming year and beyond. For the coming year, Biontech and Pfizer anticipate that they will have the capacity to manufacture up to four billion cans. For the current year, this figure is given as three billion doses.
Pfizer and Biontech had previously stated that they believe that a third dose of their vaccine will have “the highest level of protection against all variants currently tested, including Delta”. In the coming weeks, they want to present more precise data from a study on this.
In addition, Biontech and Pfizer are working on a version of the vaccine that is adapted to the Delta variant. The full spike protein of this virus variant is used, as the companies had already announced. The first batch of the new mRNA messenger molecule – the actual active ingredient – has already been produced in the Biontech plant in Mainz. A study with several hundred participants is scheduled to begin in August as soon as regulatory approval has been received.
But for the time being, Biontech continues to rely on the previous vaccine and booster vaccinations. “Our current strategy is to continue with the original vaccine,” said the medical director and Biontech co-founder Özlem Türeci at an analyst conference.
Biontech also relies on its immunization approach in the fight against cancer. The research has so far produced 15 clinical product candidates that are being investigated in 18 ongoing clinical studies, the company said.
The successes are also reflected in the share price. The paper, which has been listed on the US technology exchange Nasdaq since October 2019, has rushed from record to record in the past few weeks. Last Tuesday the price rose to $ 433.90. The course crumbled a little by Friday. At 389 dollars, however, it was still around 1200 percent above the level at the end of January 2020, before the pandemic hit the world.
On Monday, the share reacted to the new numbers with a jump in price. It was quoted at $ 431 in early New York trading.
Since the IPO, the price increase has added up to around 2500 percent. Biontech is worth around 94 billion dollars or the equivalent of almost 80 billion euros on the stock exchange. Due to the rapid rise in the share price, the brothers Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann, who hold almost half of the shares, are now among the richest Germans. The 17 percent package from CEO Sahin is worth almost 14 billion euros. According to a list by the Bloomberg news agency, he is also one of the ten richest Germans.
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
