Company is looking for partners: Investors are scrambling for Curevac

The German biotech company Curevac has successfully launched on the US stock exchange. The very first course exceeded the issue price almost three times. And the Tübingen raised hopes again: The vaccine candidate is very promising. Now you are looking for a partner.

The Tübingen biotech company Curevac made a brilliant start on the US stock exchange. The papers of the company, which is working on a corona vaccine, went to investors at 16 euros each – the shares exploded and closed at 54.26 dollars. Curevac raised more than $ 200 million in stock placement. The main investor, SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp, will retain control after the IPO with a stake of just under 50 percent.

The imagination of investors and the hope for a vaccine spurred company boss Franz-Werner Haas again when the company went public. "We believe that we have developed a very good drug candidate," he told the "Handelsblatt". The test results so far look good, also in terms of safety and tolerability.

"We won't be able to do it alone"

A central goal of the IPO is to raise money for the development of the corona vaccine. The proceeds are estimated to be around $ 150 million. With a further 50 million dollars, the short-term production capacity for the agent is to be expanded. The company will also fund other research programs, including a rabies vaccine and several cancer therapies. In total, the Tübingen-based company now has financial reserves of more than 800 million euros.

"Money is not the problem at the moment. We need a vaccine," Haas told the SZ. The company is now looking for a partner for production and marketing. "We won't be able to do it alone," he said. CureVac needs "around 400 million euros" until it is approved for the market.

The people of Tübingen have not yet received any orders for their vaccine. "But we're talking to different governments," said Haas. A price in the range of 10 to 15 euros per vaccine dose should be feasible according to the CEO. It will be some time before CureVac can begin mass production itself. "We are currently setting up production in our existing plant. The large-scale system is then scheduled to go into operation in 2022, when we can deliver billions of cans."

In the search for a vaccine against Sars-CoV-2, Curevac is one of several bearers of hope worldwide – and not the only one who is raising fresh money on the stock exchange. The day before, the share of the Chinese company Cansino, which was already listed in Hong Kong, was also traded in Shanghai – and the price doubled at times.

Curevac got rid of the 13.3 million shares initially for $ 16 each – at the upper end of the estimated price range. The placement was oversubscribed twelve times. Chief Financial Officer Pierre Kemula emphasized that the need for fresh capital was far from being met with the IPO. "We will always look for additional sources of funding," he said. As a biotech company without significant sales, Curevac is used to that. Last year, Curevac posted a loss of almost 100 million euros on sales of around 17.5 million euros.

The corona vaccine from Curevac is currently in a phase 1 series of trials, the results of which should be available in the final quarter. Curevac is currently testing the product mainly in Europe; in the next round of tests with 20,000 to 30,000 people, the company also plans to go to South America, Africa and Asia. It is planned to complete this larger series of tests in mid-2021. Then there could also be extraordinary permits in some countries to administer the vaccine. At the end of June, Curevac had 484 employees. Except for 13 in the USA, they all work in Germany.

So far, Hopp has held almost 54 percent of Curevac through his company Dievini; after the IPO it will be a good 49 percent. The stately promotional bank KfW then comes to just under 17 percent and the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to a good 8 percent. Almost ten percent of the shares are now traded on the stock exchange. In a recently completed financing round, Curevac had already raised around 560 million euros from investors. Among them was the federal government, which announced KfW's investment for 300 million euros in June. The aim was therefore also to prevent a possible takeover from abroad in the race for a corona vaccine. The Qatar sovereign wealth fund and GlaxoSmithKline also appeared as investors.

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