Moderna, Pfizer and Astra-Seneca, whose vaccines against covid-19 have been vaccinated so far, will have a steady source of income in the coming year.
That is the opinion of Mattias Häggblom, fund manager at Swedbank Robur.
- If you look at the stock market prices, you will find the winners among the small start-up companies.
I think of Moderna and Biontech, he says.
The companies are hoping for mutations
Usually, vaccines are not a particularly large source of income for pharmaceutical companies, but the corona pandemic can be a fresh start for the vaccine industry, Mattias Häggblom believes.
How great the risk of new pandemics or mutated forms of the virus is, and how long the vaccine protects will be decisive for the companies' earning potential.
- Is one round of vaccine enough or can it be like a seasonal flu?
The different outcomes obviously contribute to different financial future opportunities for companies, states Mattias Häggblom.
He adds that everything also depends on how many different vaccines are approved on the market.
It controls the price pressure that can be created over time.
- The vaccine industry is traditionally considered unsexy from an investor perspective, but this can give the entire segment a boost, he says.
New technology that works for more drugs
Astra-Seneca sells its vaccine at cost price and will therefore not make any money from it, according to themselves.
- Basically, everyone has signed up partly because they want to help and partly because it is good goodwill and PR.
But several of the pharmaceutical giants' business models are also threatened if society does not work as usual, so they have an interest like everyone else in getting society going again, says Häggblom.
Both Biontech and Moderna have a pronounced profit interest.
Moderna is currently the world's third highest valued biotech company.
Their vaccine is based on a completely new technical platform where they use the body's own capacity to produce proteins.
- Modern has a lot of other vaccines that use the same technical solution in the pipeline.
Among other things, cancer vaccine, says Mattias Häggblom, fund manager at Swedbank Robur.