Thursday, May 06, 2021
Corona vaccine brings a breakthrough
Moderna makes a profit for the first time
The corona pandemic is a curse for most people, but for the US company Moderna it is a blessing: for the first time in its history, the vaccine manufacturer posted a quarterly profit. And that can be seen: almost two billion dollars. But that’s not the only good news.
The global vaccination campaign to fight the coronavirus helped the US biotech company Moderna to make a profit for the first time in its history. This amounted to $ 1.22 billion in the first quarter of 2021, according to the vaccine manufacturer. In the previous year there was a loss of $ 124 million. Revenue shot from $ 8 million to $ 1.9 billion. Corona vaccine revenue accounted for $ 1.7 billion of this.
And the company announces another piece of good news: In the current financial year, Moderna expects revenues of 19.2 billion dollars based on the sales agreements it has already made, which significantly increases the previous forecast. Three months ago, the company had expected $ 18.4 billion. For comparison: The big US rival Pfizer is assuming annual sales of around 26 billion dollars for its corona vaccine, which it developed together with the German company Biontech.
“Talks with new governments in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America lead us to believe that our total pre-sale contracts for 2022 should be higher than those of 2021,” said CEO Stephane Bancel. Moderna plans to produce 800 million to one billion vaccine doses this year, and three billion next year. The group is hoping for approval of the vaccine for use in children as well. A study with young people between the ages of twelve and 17 showed an effectiveness of 96 percent.
Like the vaccine from Biontech and Pfizer, the Moderna vaccine is based on so-called messenger RNA technology (mRNA). This uses the human body’s messaging system to turn cells into disease control factories.
Moderna was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2010 and went public at the end of 2018. Although the biotech lost nearly $ 750 million last year and has only just posted its first quarterly profit, the prospect of a lucrative vaccine boom drove the stock up over 200 percent in the past twelve months. Recently, however, the euphoria of investors subsided again significantly, in the last three months the price fell by six percent.
Share goes down again
Even after the strong growth became known, investors reacted negatively to Moderna’s annual report and initially let the share fall significantly before the market. While earnings exceeded expectations, analysts had expected a little more for sales. Moderna and other manufacturers of corona vaccines had already come under heavy pressure on the stock exchange the day before after the US government said it would support a patent suspension initiative to contain the pandemic.
US Trade Representative Katherine Tai said that while the US is behind intellectual property protection, the pandemic is a global crisis that requires extraordinary steps. More than 100 WTO member countries want to suspend the patents for the vaccines so that they can be manufactured by more companies in more countries. However, such a project should not be easy. Tai himself warned that because of the WTO’s principle of consensus and the complexity of the matter, an agreement could be time-consuming.
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