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2021-09-30
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BioNTech: Stock Price Buoyancy Depends On Comirnaty Sales, But Long Term Value On Pipeline
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{"i18n":{"language":"zh_CN"},"detailType":1,"isChannel":false,"data":{"magic":2,"id":865442253,"tweetId":"865442253","gmtCreate":1633013712650,"gmtModify":1633013712887,"author":{"id":3574428256060280,"idStr":"3574428256060280","authorId":3574428256060280,"authorIdStr":"3574428256060280","name":"KinKin","avatar":"https://static.tigerbbs.com/b4f58c29c0c165071cb594bd19ce588a","vip":1,"userType":1,"introduction":"","boolIsFan":false,"boolIsHead":false,"crmLevel":2,"crmLevelSwitch":0,"individualDisplayBadges":[],"fanSize":15,"starInvestorFlag":false},"themes":[],"images":[],"coverImages":[],"extraTitle":"","html":"<html><head></head><body><p>Hi</p></body></html>","htmlText":"<html><head></head><body><p>Hi</p></body></html>","text":"Hi","highlighted":1,"essential":1,"paper":1,"likeSize":3,"commentSize":1,"repostSize":0,"favoriteSize":0,"link":"https://laohu8.com/post/865442253","repostId":1149815025,"repostType":4,"repost":{"id":"1149815025","pubTimestamp":1633013380,"share":"https://www.laohu8.com/m/news/1149815025?lang=&edition=full","pubTime":"2021-09-30 22:49","market":"us","language":"en","title":"BioNTech: Stock Price Buoyancy Depends On Comirnaty Sales, But Long Term Value On Pipeline","url":"https://stock-news.laohu8.com/highlight/detail?id=1149815025","media":"Seeking Alpha","summary":"Summary\n\nBioNTech has been a phenomenal success story for investors, delivering a ~1,900% gain on in","content":"<p><b>Summary</b></p>\n<ul>\n <li>BioNTech has been a phenomenal success story for investors, delivering a ~1,900% gain on investment since its 2019 IPO.</li>\n <li>Sales of its mRNA vaccine Comirnaty will earn the company in excess of $18bn in 2021, management believes - firmly ahead of expectations.</li>\n <li>These revenues are likely not sustainable, however - I expect them to dip below $10bn from 2022.</li>\n <li>Nevertheless, BioNTech has never been about a single vaccine and the pipeline excites.</li>\n <li>mRNA technology is here to stay and BioNTech's pipeline will soon become the key measure for valuing the company. It may take time but a triple-digit billion valuation is a distinct possibility in my view.</li>\n</ul>\n<p class=\"t-img-caption\"><img src=\"https://static.tigerbbs.com/d4c2347e8f25525b37a93f78e0d8ba65\" tg-width=\"1536\" tg-height=\"1092\" width=\"100%\" height=\"auto\"><span>PM Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images</span></p>\n<p><b>Investment Thesis</b></p>\n<p>BioNTech (BNTX) shareholders who backed the messenger-RNA pioneer at the time of the Germany based company's IPO, which raised ~$150m at a price of $15, can be well satisfied with a >1,900% gain on investment to date - but is the company still worth backing at current price of $277 per share?</p>\n<p>When I last covered BioNTech back in February, I set a share price forecast of ~$200 for BioNTech stock, but that was based on sales of its Comirnaty COVID vaccine - jointly developed with Pfizer (PFE) - reaching ~$7.5bn in 2021.</p>\n<p>Releasing its Q2'21 results in early August, the company reported 6-month revenues of $8.56bn - shattering my expectations - and its share price reached a stunning peak of $388.</p>\n<p>At the time of writing, shares have fallen back to a price of $277 - discounted by ~29% from their August peak, but with full-year revenues forecast by management to be in the region of $18.5bn, and net profits perhaps reaching >$13.5bn (if we take 6-month net profit figure of $6.8bn and double it), investors will likely look at a forward price to sales ratio of 4x, and forward price to earnings ratio of ~5x, and feel that BioNTech stock continues to look great value.</p>\n<p>Essentially, two factors will determine whether BioNTech shares are worth buying at current price, and also how long investors should think about holding them.</p>\n<p>The first is the scale of ongoing demand for its COVID vaccine Comirnaty. Sadly, revenues from this source have probably exceeded the market's wildest expectations, with the pandemic refusing to die down, and with booster shots now approved to be administered to over-65's in the US, and to over-50's in the UK, and under consideration for all people over the age of 16 in Europe, there appears to be no set limit to how many Comirnaty shots BioNTech will eventually sell.</p>\n<p>The second is the migration of the use of messenger-RNA technologies into other therapeutic modalities, to target a broad range of diseases, where it can potentially challenge current standards of care on efficacy and safety.</p>\n<p>Only in a nightmare scenario will vaccine demand remain at current levels beyond the next 2-3 years, and therefore BioNTech's revenues will not remain at 2021 levels over the long term, unless it can launch new vaccine products targeting e.g. other infectious diseases, oncology, auto-immune, inflammation, regenerative medicines, etc.</p>\n<p>To that end, BioNTech recently released a 70-slide presentation highlighting its development pipeline, and reporting progress across all the above treatment fields. Not one single mention of its COVID vaccine can be found, illustrating that BioNTech has never, and will never think of itself as a pure COVID vaccine company.</p>\n<p>Even so, it will take time to successfully develop new mRNA therapies in other indications, and success is not guaranteed.</p>\n<p>New challengers are emerging in the mRNA field, with strong investor backing and ambitious goals - China-based pharma Abogen Biosciences, for example,recently raised > $700m of funding to develop an mRNA COVID vaccine whilst Sanofi (SNY), the French Pharma company with a >$120bn market cap valuation recently splashed out $3.2bn to acquire Translate Bio, and its messenger RNA Technology targeting Cystic Fibrosis and other genetic diseases.</p>\n<p>6 months ago, Moderna (MRNA), BioNTech and CureVac were probably considered the \"Big 3\" mRNA pioneers, but CureVac's failure to successfully develop a COVID vaccine has wiped >50% off of its market value whilst Moderna stock has realized unprecedented highs, trading at a price of $390 at the time of writing, with a market valuation of $157bn.</p>\n<p>That is a staggeringly high valuation, but as I argued in my last post on BioNTech and in other posts on Moderna itself, that valuation could potentially double again if the company can prove that mRNA technology will work in any therapeutic setting - as it is striving to do.</p>\n<p>I would certainly argue that BioNTech has more in common with Moderna than it does with CureVac - the company will earn a similar volume of revenues in FY21 as Moderna, and yet its market cap of $75bn is half that of Moderna's.</p>\n<p>That may be due firstly to the market's perception that BioNTech owes much of its success to Pfizer, whilst Moderna is not reliant on a Big Pharma partner, and secondly on the strength of Moderna's non-COVID programs.</p>\n<p>In the rest of this post I will take a closer look at BioNTech's Covid earnings, and its longer-term development pipeline in order to highlight the short and long-term investment cases.</p>\n<p>My thesis is that BioNTech is not worth less than half Moderna, and that Moderna itself is potentially undervalued relative to its opportunities to develop mRNA vaccines and therapies in other therapeutic modalities.</p>\n<p>As such, my feeling is that investors can pick up BioNTech stock at current price and be optimistic of ~30% near-term upside, based on recent developments with Comirnaty, and the introduction of booster shots.</p>\n<p>A dip may follow if COVID revenues begin to slide after 2022, which I expect to happen, and be pronounced, but this ought to be offset by pipeline progress, which suggests to me that BioNTech could maintain a >$100bn market cap, which may even be at the lower end of expectations.</p>\n<p><b>Outlook for Comirnaty</b></p>\n<p>Pfizer/BioNTech'sCovid vaccine - now known as Comirnaty, is fully approved by the FDA, and used in >130 countries in the fight against Coronavirus.</p>\n<p>In the first 6 months of 2021, BioNTech and Pfizer shipped >1bn doses of Comirnaty, signed supply contracts to deliver another 2.2bn doses by the end of the year, and committed to supply a further 2bn doses to low and middle-income nations, according to a summation in BioNTech's Q2'21 earnings presentation.</p>\n<p>Alongside an agreement signed with the EU to provide 900m doses, and potentially another 900m - doses that had been earmarked for fulfilment by CureVac before its vaccine failed to achieve the required efficacy in its pivotal trial, with just 47% versus Pfizer / BioNTech's >95% - there are 90m doses going to the US, and potentially 90m more in 2022.</p>\n<p>Since August, however, Comirnaty has received an Emergency Use Authorisation (\"EUA\") for use as a booster vaccine, for individuals 65 years of age and older, and individuals ages 18 through 64 within certain high-risk groups, based on data suggesting that the vaccine \"elicits high neutralization titers against SARS-CoV-2 and all currently tested variants\".</p>\n<p>Covid is simply refusing to go away, with a significant spike in infections, hospitalizations and deaths reported across the past 2 months, according to data from the New York Times.</p>\n<p>Just as it was the first vaccine approved in the US for COVID, Comirnaty is now the first to be approved as a booster shot, and it seems logical that, in time, booster shots will be extended to the entire US population, and populations worldwide. Looking further ahead, it also seems likely that annual or biannual shots will be required as COVID becomes an endemic disease.</p>\n<p>With that said, I would argue that it is unlikely that BioNTech will replicate its $18bn of sales - which works out at just under 1bn doses - in 2021 in future years.</p>\n<p>At maximum capacity, Pfizer/BioNTech can manufacture ~2bn doses per annum, so we can be fairly sure that each firms' sales are capped at >$20bn per annum, but it is also likely that both companies average selling price will decrease after 2021, as the vaccine rollout switches from developed, to developing nations.</p>\n<p>Arguably, if every global citizen receives 2 vaccinations per annum, there is demand for ~16bn doses per annum, and as a key supplier, BioNTech would have no issues selling 1bn doses per annum. The deals recently done with the EU are not far short of such figures, but they may not be repeatable, and logistically speaking there is little or no chance that any population globally will be able to achieve >50% population vaccination in a single year in my view.</p>\n<p>As such, I would not expect to see BioNTech earn double-digit billions from Comirnaty sales in any year after 2021, and its profit margins may well narrow after this year - the near 80% profit margin achieved across the first 6 months of 2021 is also simply unsustainable from an economic or ethical viewpoint.</p>\n<p>I would put forward an average figure of ~$8bn per annum for BioNTech's earnings from Comirnaty between 2022 - 2025, for the reasons discussed above, and a profit margin average of ~50%.</p>\n<p>That gives me a price to sales ratio of ~9.4x and price to earnings ratio of ~19x - not especially attractive, but realistic, and for a company with as much promise as BioNTech, perhaps a strong value proposition, given what may come from its pipeline.</p>\n<p><b>Outlook for Pipeline</b></p>\n<p>When we think about the fact that neither BioNTech nor Moderna can realistically rely on revenues or profit margins from its COVID vaccine sales being sustained over the long term at current levels, their valuations - $75bn and $153bn respectively - may look too high.</p>\n<p>But believers in mRNA technology - and why wouldn't anyone be excited by a technology as powerful as mRNA, which can effectively instruct cells to manufacture literally any protein - may feel that both companies are significantly undervalued.</p>\n<p>The key question, however, is whether each company is able to deliver the hoped for revolution in medicine - personalized vaccines for many/all disease types, tailored to the patients' specific genetic profile - how long it will take, what the risk of failure is, and what will happen to each company's share price in the interim period.</p>\n<p>The first and most obvious targets are infectious diseases - then oncology, CAR-T cell therapy, immuno-therapies, and then expansion into multiple modalities, covering most disease types that any investor can care to think of.</p>\n<p>12 months ago even, BioNTech's infectious disease pipeline went largely under the radar but emboldened by its success with Comirnaty, BioNTech now boasts vaccines in development for Malaria, Tuberculosis and HIV, 10 mRNA vaccines in clinical development targeting infectious diseases, and an influenza vaccine, jointly developed with Pfizer, which implies that the 2 companies are willing to work together over the long term - perhaps a merger is even a possibility.</p>\n<p>By the end of this year, BioNTech will deliver 5 trial updates from vaccines targeting solid tumors, leveraging bi-specifics, CD40, and CAR-T cell therapy, and largely targeting solid tumors, initiate 3 Phase 2 trials, targeting melanoma, head and neck cancer, and colorectal cancer, as well as 7 Phase 1 trials, including its influenza vaccine program.</p>\n<p>All of the company's plans are laid out in its latest investor presentation- collaborations with Pharma powerhouses such as Regeneron (REGN), Genentech (a Roche subsidiary), and Sanofi, as well as Pfizer.</p>\n<p>There are 15 oncology programs in total, 6 infectious disease vaccines (admittedly still at the preclinical stage), therapies targeting PD-1 / PDL1, the targets of cancer blockbuster drugs such as Bristol Myers Squibb's (BMY) Opdivo and Merck's (MRK) Keytruda, cell therapies, and cytokine inhibitors.</p>\n<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>\n<p>My point in relation to both BioNTech and Moderna is that both are increasingly beginning to behave more and more like Big Pharma firms - anticipating that their revenue-generating assets may not have a lengthy shelf life, and understanding that they must deliver new medicines in order to support current valuations over the longer term.</p>\n<p>Reviewing BioNtech's latest investor presentation - which I encourage all prospective investors to do - I was struck by the amount of progress BioNTech has made in a single year, and not just from a development perspective - the company has always had grand ambitions - but from an organisational, and PR perspective also.</p>\n<p>There's no question in my mind that the market still values BioNTech as if it were a pure COVID vaccine play, and any company with a single, $18bn per annum selling asset is highly unlikely to be able to distract investor's attention away from that asset.</p>\n<p>But BioNtech and its management team are smarter than most, in my view, just like their technology, and it is planning for the long term.</p>\n<p>Data readouts in oncology - and there ought to be 5 before the end of this year - and progress towards commercialisation of a new infectious disease vaccine - will rapidly become the key yardsticks for assessing the true value of BioNTech shares.</p>\n<p>There is currently no need for investors to be concerned about BioNtech's share price crashing on negative data readouts from these programs - when there are double-digit billion annual revenues in play - but these programs will increasingly replace Comirnaty sales as the stock markets' weighing machine, and that ought to be good news for fans of mRNA science - of which I am one.</p>\n<p>It may take time, but BioNTech represents an exciting buy and hold opportunity for biotech enthusiasts, in my view.</p>","collect":0,"html":"<!DOCTYPE html>\n<html>\n<head>\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\" />\n<meta name=\"viewport\" content=\"width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,minimum-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=no\"/>\n<meta name=\"format-detection\" content=\"telephone=no,email=no,address=no\" />\n<title>BioNTech: Stock Price Buoyancy Depends On Comirnaty Sales, But Long Term Value On Pipeline</title>\n<style 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margin: 0;line-height: 11px;}\n.small {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.9); -webkit-transform: scale(0.9); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.smaller {font-size: 12.5px; display: inline-block; transform: scale(0.8); -webkit-transform: scale(0.8); transform-origin: left; -webkit-transform-origin: left;}\n.bt-text {font-size: 12px;margin: 1.5em 0 0 0}\n.bt-text p {margin: 0}\n</style>\n</head>\n<body>\n<div class=\"wrapper\">\n<header>\n<h2 class=\"title\">\nBioNTech: Stock Price Buoyancy Depends On Comirnaty Sales, But Long Term Value On Pipeline\n</h2>\n\n<h4 class=\"meta\">\n\n\n2021-09-30 22:49 GMT+8 <a href=https://seekingalpha.com/article/4457813-biontech-stock-price-buoyancy-depends-on-comirnaty-sales-but-long-term-value-on-pipeline-bntx><strong>Seeking Alpha</strong></a>\n\n\n</h4>\n\n</header>\n<article>\n<div>\n<p>Summary\n\nBioNTech has been a phenomenal success story for investors, delivering a ~1,900% gain on investment since its 2019 IPO.\nSales of its mRNA vaccine Comirnaty will earn the company in excess of ...</p>\n\n<a href=\"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4457813-biontech-stock-price-buoyancy-depends-on-comirnaty-sales-but-long-term-value-on-pipeline-bntx\">Web Link</a>\n\n</div>\n\n\n</article>\n</div>\n</body>\n</html>\n","type":0,"thumbnail":"","relate_stocks":{"BNTX":"BioNTech SE"},"source_url":"https://seekingalpha.com/article/4457813-biontech-stock-price-buoyancy-depends-on-comirnaty-sales-but-long-term-value-on-pipeline-bntx","is_english":true,"share_image_url":"https://static.laohu8.com/e9f99090a1c2ed51c021029395664489","article_id":"1149815025","content_text":"Summary\n\nBioNTech has been a phenomenal success story for investors, delivering a ~1,900% gain on investment since its 2019 IPO.\nSales of its mRNA vaccine Comirnaty will earn the company in excess of $18bn in 2021, management believes - firmly ahead of expectations.\nThese revenues are likely not sustainable, however - I expect them to dip below $10bn from 2022.\nNevertheless, BioNTech has never been about a single vaccine and the pipeline excites.\nmRNA technology is here to stay and BioNTech's pipeline will soon become the key measure for valuing the company. It may take time but a triple-digit billion valuation is a distinct possibility in my view.\n\nPM Images/DigitalVision via Getty Images\nInvestment Thesis\nBioNTech (BNTX) shareholders who backed the messenger-RNA pioneer at the time of the Germany based company's IPO, which raised ~$150m at a price of $15, can be well satisfied with a >1,900% gain on investment to date - but is the company still worth backing at current price of $277 per share?\nWhen I last covered BioNTech back in February, I set a share price forecast of ~$200 for BioNTech stock, but that was based on sales of its Comirnaty COVID vaccine - jointly developed with Pfizer (PFE) - reaching ~$7.5bn in 2021.\nReleasing its Q2'21 results in early August, the company reported 6-month revenues of $8.56bn - shattering my expectations - and its share price reached a stunning peak of $388.\nAt the time of writing, shares have fallen back to a price of $277 - discounted by ~29% from their August peak, but with full-year revenues forecast by management to be in the region of $18.5bn, and net profits perhaps reaching >$13.5bn (if we take 6-month net profit figure of $6.8bn and double it), investors will likely look at a forward price to sales ratio of 4x, and forward price to earnings ratio of ~5x, and feel that BioNTech stock continues to look great value.\nEssentially, two factors will determine whether BioNTech shares are worth buying at current price, and also how long investors should think about holding them.\nThe first is the scale of ongoing demand for its COVID vaccine Comirnaty. Sadly, revenues from this source have probably exceeded the market's wildest expectations, with the pandemic refusing to die down, and with booster shots now approved to be administered to over-65's in the US, and to over-50's in the UK, and under consideration for all people over the age of 16 in Europe, there appears to be no set limit to how many Comirnaty shots BioNTech will eventually sell.\nThe second is the migration of the use of messenger-RNA technologies into other therapeutic modalities, to target a broad range of diseases, where it can potentially challenge current standards of care on efficacy and safety.\nOnly in a nightmare scenario will vaccine demand remain at current levels beyond the next 2-3 years, and therefore BioNTech's revenues will not remain at 2021 levels over the long term, unless it can launch new vaccine products targeting e.g. other infectious diseases, oncology, auto-immune, inflammation, regenerative medicines, etc.\nTo that end, BioNTech recently released a 70-slide presentation highlighting its development pipeline, and reporting progress across all the above treatment fields. Not one single mention of its COVID vaccine can be found, illustrating that BioNTech has never, and will never think of itself as a pure COVID vaccine company.\nEven so, it will take time to successfully develop new mRNA therapies in other indications, and success is not guaranteed.\nNew challengers are emerging in the mRNA field, with strong investor backing and ambitious goals - China-based pharma Abogen Biosciences, for example,recently raised > $700m of funding to develop an mRNA COVID vaccine whilst Sanofi (SNY), the French Pharma company with a >$120bn market cap valuation recently splashed out $3.2bn to acquire Translate Bio, and its messenger RNA Technology targeting Cystic Fibrosis and other genetic diseases.\n6 months ago, Moderna (MRNA), BioNTech and CureVac were probably considered the \"Big 3\" mRNA pioneers, but CureVac's failure to successfully develop a COVID vaccine has wiped >50% off of its market value whilst Moderna stock has realized unprecedented highs, trading at a price of $390 at the time of writing, with a market valuation of $157bn.\nThat is a staggeringly high valuation, but as I argued in my last post on BioNTech and in other posts on Moderna itself, that valuation could potentially double again if the company can prove that mRNA technology will work in any therapeutic setting - as it is striving to do.\nI would certainly argue that BioNTech has more in common with Moderna than it does with CureVac - the company will earn a similar volume of revenues in FY21 as Moderna, and yet its market cap of $75bn is half that of Moderna's.\nThat may be due firstly to the market's perception that BioNTech owes much of its success to Pfizer, whilst Moderna is not reliant on a Big Pharma partner, and secondly on the strength of Moderna's non-COVID programs.\nIn the rest of this post I will take a closer look at BioNTech's Covid earnings, and its longer-term development pipeline in order to highlight the short and long-term investment cases.\nMy thesis is that BioNTech is not worth less than half Moderna, and that Moderna itself is potentially undervalued relative to its opportunities to develop mRNA vaccines and therapies in other therapeutic modalities.\nAs such, my feeling is that investors can pick up BioNTech stock at current price and be optimistic of ~30% near-term upside, based on recent developments with Comirnaty, and the introduction of booster shots.\nA dip may follow if COVID revenues begin to slide after 2022, which I expect to happen, and be pronounced, but this ought to be offset by pipeline progress, which suggests to me that BioNTech could maintain a >$100bn market cap, which may even be at the lower end of expectations.\nOutlook for Comirnaty\nPfizer/BioNTech'sCovid vaccine - now known as Comirnaty, is fully approved by the FDA, and used in >130 countries in the fight against Coronavirus.\nIn the first 6 months of 2021, BioNTech and Pfizer shipped >1bn doses of Comirnaty, signed supply contracts to deliver another 2.2bn doses by the end of the year, and committed to supply a further 2bn doses to low and middle-income nations, according to a summation in BioNTech's Q2'21 earnings presentation.\nAlongside an agreement signed with the EU to provide 900m doses, and potentially another 900m - doses that had been earmarked for fulfilment by CureVac before its vaccine failed to achieve the required efficacy in its pivotal trial, with just 47% versus Pfizer / BioNTech's >95% - there are 90m doses going to the US, and potentially 90m more in 2022.\nSince August, however, Comirnaty has received an Emergency Use Authorisation (\"EUA\") for use as a booster vaccine, for individuals 65 years of age and older, and individuals ages 18 through 64 within certain high-risk groups, based on data suggesting that the vaccine \"elicits high neutralization titers against SARS-CoV-2 and all currently tested variants\".\nCovid is simply refusing to go away, with a significant spike in infections, hospitalizations and deaths reported across the past 2 months, according to data from the New York Times.\nJust as it was the first vaccine approved in the US for COVID, Comirnaty is now the first to be approved as a booster shot, and it seems logical that, in time, booster shots will be extended to the entire US population, and populations worldwide. Looking further ahead, it also seems likely that annual or biannual shots will be required as COVID becomes an endemic disease.\nWith that said, I would argue that it is unlikely that BioNTech will replicate its $18bn of sales - which works out at just under 1bn doses - in 2021 in future years.\nAt maximum capacity, Pfizer/BioNTech can manufacture ~2bn doses per annum, so we can be fairly sure that each firms' sales are capped at >$20bn per annum, but it is also likely that both companies average selling price will decrease after 2021, as the vaccine rollout switches from developed, to developing nations.\nArguably, if every global citizen receives 2 vaccinations per annum, there is demand for ~16bn doses per annum, and as a key supplier, BioNTech would have no issues selling 1bn doses per annum. The deals recently done with the EU are not far short of such figures, but they may not be repeatable, and logistically speaking there is little or no chance that any population globally will be able to achieve >50% population vaccination in a single year in my view.\nAs such, I would not expect to see BioNTech earn double-digit billions from Comirnaty sales in any year after 2021, and its profit margins may well narrow after this year - the near 80% profit margin achieved across the first 6 months of 2021 is also simply unsustainable from an economic or ethical viewpoint.\nI would put forward an average figure of ~$8bn per annum for BioNTech's earnings from Comirnaty between 2022 - 2025, for the reasons discussed above, and a profit margin average of ~50%.\nThat gives me a price to sales ratio of ~9.4x and price to earnings ratio of ~19x - not especially attractive, but realistic, and for a company with as much promise as BioNTech, perhaps a strong value proposition, given what may come from its pipeline.\nOutlook for Pipeline\nWhen we think about the fact that neither BioNTech nor Moderna can realistically rely on revenues or profit margins from its COVID vaccine sales being sustained over the long term at current levels, their valuations - $75bn and $153bn respectively - may look too high.\nBut believers in mRNA technology - and why wouldn't anyone be excited by a technology as powerful as mRNA, which can effectively instruct cells to manufacture literally any protein - may feel that both companies are significantly undervalued.\nThe key question, however, is whether each company is able to deliver the hoped for revolution in medicine - personalized vaccines for many/all disease types, tailored to the patients' specific genetic profile - how long it will take, what the risk of failure is, and what will happen to each company's share price in the interim period.\nThe first and most obvious targets are infectious diseases - then oncology, CAR-T cell therapy, immuno-therapies, and then expansion into multiple modalities, covering most disease types that any investor can care to think of.\n12 months ago even, BioNTech's infectious disease pipeline went largely under the radar but emboldened by its success with Comirnaty, BioNTech now boasts vaccines in development for Malaria, Tuberculosis and HIV, 10 mRNA vaccines in clinical development targeting infectious diseases, and an influenza vaccine, jointly developed with Pfizer, which implies that the 2 companies are willing to work together over the long term - perhaps a merger is even a possibility.\nBy the end of this year, BioNTech will deliver 5 trial updates from vaccines targeting solid tumors, leveraging bi-specifics, CD40, and CAR-T cell therapy, and largely targeting solid tumors, initiate 3 Phase 2 trials, targeting melanoma, head and neck cancer, and colorectal cancer, as well as 7 Phase 1 trials, including its influenza vaccine program.\nAll of the company's plans are laid out in its latest investor presentation- collaborations with Pharma powerhouses such as Regeneron (REGN), Genentech (a Roche subsidiary), and Sanofi, as well as Pfizer.\nThere are 15 oncology programs in total, 6 infectious disease vaccines (admittedly still at the preclinical stage), therapies targeting PD-1 / PDL1, the targets of cancer blockbuster drugs such as Bristol Myers Squibb's (BMY) Opdivo and Merck's (MRK) Keytruda, cell therapies, and cytokine inhibitors.\nConclusion\nMy point in relation to both BioNTech and Moderna is that both are increasingly beginning to behave more and more like Big Pharma firms - anticipating that their revenue-generating assets may not have a lengthy shelf life, and understanding that they must deliver new medicines in order to support current valuations over the longer term.\nReviewing BioNtech's latest investor presentation - which I encourage all prospective investors to do - I was struck by the amount of progress BioNTech has made in a single year, and not just from a development perspective - the company has always had grand ambitions - but from an organisational, and PR perspective also.\nThere's no question in my mind that the market still values BioNTech as if it were a pure COVID vaccine play, and any company with a single, $18bn per annum selling asset is highly unlikely to be able to distract investor's attention away from that asset.\nBut BioNtech and its management team are smarter than most, in my view, just like their technology, and it is planning for the long term.\nData readouts in oncology - and there ought to be 5 before the end of this year - and progress towards commercialisation of a new infectious disease vaccine - will rapidly become the key yardsticks for assessing the true value of BioNTech shares.\nThere is currently no need for investors to be concerned about BioNtech's share price crashing on negative data readouts from these programs - when there are double-digit billion annual revenues in play - but these programs will increasingly replace Comirnaty sales as the stock markets' weighing machine, and that ought to be good news for fans of mRNA science - of which I am one.\nIt may take time, but BioNTech represents an exciting buy and hold opportunity for biotech enthusiasts, in my view.","news_type":1},"isVote":1,"tweetType":1,"viewCount":492,"commentLimit":10,"likeStatus":false,"favoriteStatus":false,"reportStatus":false,"symbols":[],"verified":2,"subType":0,"readableState":1,"langContent":"CN","currentLanguage":"CN","warmUpFlag":false,"orderFlag":false,"shareable":true,"causeOfNotShareable":"","featuresForAnalytics":[],"commentAndTweetFlag":false,"andRepostAutoSelectedFlag":false,"upFlag":false,"length":2,"xxTargetLangEnum":"ZH_CN"},"commentList":[],"isCommentEnd":true,"isTiger":false,"isWeiXinMini":false,"url":"/m/post/865442253"}
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