Chicken Little schreef op 28 mei 2015 14:51:
General info:
www.wsj.com/articles/european-biotech...European Biotech Firms Head to Wall Street
Biotech companies can fetch higher valuations in the U.S. than in their home marketsDavid Grainger, a partner at venture-capital group Index Ventures in London, said he doesn’t think the bull run in biotech companies will last. “The continuing appetite to buy almost any IPO that comes to market is self-sustaining, bubblelike behavior,” he said.
Mr. Grainger predicted that a “significant number” of the pre-revenue biotech companies listed on Nasdaq would “dramatically fail over the next 12 months and dent investor enthusiasm.” Still, he has more confidence in the European companies that have made it onto Nasdaq, since “only the most attractive European IPO-able biotechs will get anywhere on a U.S. listing.”
Biotech fund manager David Pinniger, of Polar Capital in London, is more bullish. He said the valuations of most recently listed companies haven’t looked particularly frothy, adding that an investor who had invested in every single biotech IPO in 2013 and 2014 as a simple strategy would have “materially underperformed” the standard sector benchmark index, the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index.
He added that European companies are heading to the U.S. because “that’s where capital markets are most appreciative” of their growth stories and where investors are “prepared to take risks.”
The performance of the sector in recent years has been driven by the stronger-than-expected earnings growth of the larger, profitable companies such as Gilead being delivered right now, rather than speculation over the long-term potential of smaller-capitalization, unprofitable companies, he said.
Mr. Pinniger also said there has been a “profound” shift in the productivity of the biotech industry, which legitimately underpins investor enthusiasm for the sector.
“Computing power and IT is enabling us to understand what’s going on in terms of the biology of health and disease and enabling us to identify more points of molecular intervention,” he said. “If you ally that with the proliferation of powerful new tools and technology that enable you to intervene and change that biology, that is a profound transformation.”