The Corona year 2020 is (logically) also the year of the BioTech companies. This is also the case for CureVac: Along with some other companies, this is considered a promising candidate to bring a reliable vaccine against COVID-19 onto the market. After a financial injection of a full 640 million dollars in July (including by the German government, GlaxoSmithKline and the Qatar Investment Authority), the IPO in New York has now been successful.
And how. On the first day of trading (last Friday), the vaccine manufacturer gained 250 percent. The issue price of $ 16 was probably chosen too low for investors’ appetite for BioTech. CureVac’s stock is currently $ 56. The IPO brought the company, which is headquartered in Tübingen, $ 213 million (approx. The money is to be used to advance the development of a corona vaccine – if successful, a billion-dollar business.
German state should get out again
Curevac’s IPO is not undisputed. Because the German state also invested 300 million euros in the vaccine group this year. Since the vaccine manufacturer is now listed on NASDAQ, German taxpayers’ money would be subject to the ups and downs of stock market prices – which is why the German state should quickly withdraw from the company. Achim Wambach, head of the Monopolies Commission, has already spoken out in favor of the state leaving the company quickly after the Corona crisis.
On the product side, CureVac has to keep going. The plan is to launch the COVID vaccine in the first half of 2021. Results of a clinical test of a corona vaccine candidate are to be presented in September. CureVac received approval to develop a vaccination against Sars-CoV-2 in Germany and Belgium in June. If everything goes according to plan, the company wants to expand production capacities so that one billion or more doses of the vaccine can be produced annually from 2022.
CureVac is currently valued at nearly ten billion dollars. The majority shareholder of the 20-year-old company is SAP co-founder Dietmar Hopp. But not only CureVac, also the Swedish-British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, Moderna from the USA or BioNTech from Germany with partner Pfizer have already reached test phase 3.
–
