I won't labour the point, but note that family offices are usually run by professionals who are given a high degree of independence, and who are more concerned with overall performance than with that of any individual holding.
As regards valuation, I'm sure you're right that OXB is undervalued - that's why we're all here of course - but there's usually a reason for chronic undervaluation. It's easy to say it's just the history, but I always remember the old saying - the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent. It's not easy to change that sort of perception and I don't have the impression that the management are much inclined to start banging their own drum.
Anyway, I hope you're right and £15 is a possibility, but I'm certainly not putting it in any of my spreadsheets! |
 Super,
I'm happy with your points, but just a couple of things I want to be clear on.
Serum aren't a fund, they are a private family company and world's biggest vaccine company. The guy who put £50m in essentially put his own family money into OXB and wants to be part of the future (in a similar way to the Merieux family recently, but different reasons).
OXB is on the naughty step because they lost a pandemic customer which was 87% of their work, then used a combination of cash, shares and loan to buy some guaranteed work in at the same time as rights to a vector for a bigger market. The company who provided the guaranteed work which came with that deal then went out of business.
Today OXB have market cap of £300m and sales this year will be minimum £126m. So we are on a multiple of 2.4x sales.
Last list I saw for CDMO for comparison:-
Lonza 7.6x
Avid Bioservices 10.1x
Catalent 6.5x
Vigene 9x
Cognate Bioservices 6.3x
Now that's a little bit out of date because obviously Novo have recently bought Catalent and Charles River bought Cognate, but OXB is way undervalued at present and as pure CGT should command a multiple at the top of that table (if not higher) as specialist viral vector companies are thin on the ground. Specialist viral vector tech owning CDMOs? Even rarer.
OXB off the naughty step, rehabilitated in the market as a profitable CDMO with appropriate multiple - then the bid premium. It would be a lot of money else the major holders would just say no. |
Harry - I share your optimism about the future prospects for the business, but not your view on a buyout. I don't think the price Sarum paid for their shares will count for much in the event of an offer. PIs are always anchored to their buy price, but IIs generally mark to market (indeed, in some cases are legally obliged to - that's how funds calculate NAV) so they hold shares at current value.
In any case the fund manager at the time of buyout is rarely the fund manager who acquired the holding so there's no ego involved - 'it's not me selling too low, but him buying too high that's the problem - on my watch it's doubled and I'll take that, thank you very much'.
So doubling the share price at the time of any offer would be an excellent result - look around to see how often that's bettered - and £15+ is (as things stand) somewhere off in La La land. There's no more certain way to disappoint than to set expectations too high. |
Kyri's Mrs GH, so I would have thought it's not about the money. Don't these things have expiry dates? |
Pippa only sold 800ish shares.
Maybe she just needed the money… |
Pippa only sold 800ish shares.
Maybe she just needed the money… |
Well either Pippa is a very stupid girl to accept £3, has been told there is no news imminent that would drive the share price up, or has been obliged to cash in before expiry.
Which is it? |
I agree with you there Ygor, but would just add that a lot of the investment managers can't buy smallcap and so will have to wait anyway.
Sliding off sideways into another passage from the memoires here, whilst I've always had both hopes and expectations for OXB (so two different targets), those have changed as OXB has changed - and over the last couple of decades OXB has changed a lot.
Had TroVax succeeded in its PIII trial then it would have retired quite a few of us from that time very early. It didn't, but if there wasn't the risk of this then there wouldn't be the reward either.
The 20 year older me likes the idea of helping with 50+ customer programmes much more than the 20 year younger me wondering how the patients are doing on one of our own in house trials on which everything hinged. Yes the ultimate reward will be less than it could have been but so is the risk (now spread across 50+ programmes).
So I sit here quite happy knowing how much capacity we have in France, America and the UK, safe in the knowledge that Seb's sales team is possessed with the goal of filling it all.
I have a mindset of holding shares forever. Obviously a sweeping statement there, but I do tend to hold all my shares for a very long time if I think the company is sound. A trailing stop loss when the world panicked at the end of the AZ vaccine contract would have been a much better strategy with hindsight, but I never imagined OXB would drop lower than the pre-covid price when they were sat on a massive covid cash windfall. We live and learn.
I still hope to hold OXB as a very profitable market leader one day, but after reading the Novo boss explain that he's going to use his weight loss drug billions to buy up speciality service providers to the pharmaceutical sector, and remembering that he already owns 12% of OXB, I'm sort of resigned to the fact that one day in the not too distant future OXB will be a Novo company.
If that happens then so be it and it saves me a decision which I would take far too long over.
Novo are awash with money (their profit was $3.65bn last year and they are forecasting +20 to 30% on that this year).
As far as I know Serum are the major shareholder in at the highest price (3% at just under £15 per share) so I guess an offer which they are happy with would have all the other major holders agreeing too?
This all leads me to think that somewhere in our not too distant future there is a combination of revenue forecast and buyout multiple (of that), where Serum thinks it's enough and it also doesn't look like Novo is paying too much. What that figure would be (or when) I've no idea, but I don't expect Serum to take a loss on their shares. |
Great chart for simple minds! Auto Immune space.HTTps://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrewpannu_cell-therapy-is-in-the-middle-of-a-huge-shift-activity-7211723597545897984-sgnC?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_androidCabaletta Bio prominent |
jez,
I think you may be a tad over cautious in 8182. Then again I tend to the optimistic, but just a few points:-
Our last normal year is 2019 and as we all know at the end of that year everything changes with covid.
We spend that year in the £5 to £7 range and we were a smaller company with 19 partner programmes which we all thought brilliant at the time.
There's no way we should have dropped below that after the covid boom / bust, yet here we are today with 51 partner programmes and a £3 share price which has been lower.
You know that story well I appreciate, but it's also important to remember that the numbers / statistics are with you now.
What I mean by that is to say that the fraction of that 19 programmes in 2019 which survived the restrictions of covid and were successful in trials, well they are now coming up for 5 years more progressed.
Back then we had the hope that some of them would come good, today we know that we have 2 more programmes at Phase 3 (was 1 last year - now 3) and as Frank said in his results speech, the 3 that we have in Phase 3 trials doesn't include any which might get BLA approval straight from Phase 2 or the new multiple myeloma deal which he already lists as commercial.
Ignoring the exceptional covid vaccine work, the single commercial agreement with Novartis as been our biggest long term earner.
Our bioprocessing revenue in 2019 was £47m and the first Novartis contract they signed guaranteed them $75m in manufacturing fees over 5 years. It's been much extended and expanded since, I'm simply making the point that the contract has been a big thing for us.
Frank has just added another one to it for CAR-T multiple myeloma (partner currently unknown) and has 3 more at Phase 3. It's reasonable to expect that 2 of the 3 on Phase 3 will hit their data and get approval. Then there will be 4 of these long term manufacture and supply contracts. We don't know how many qualify for a Biologics License Application (BLA) from Phase 2. It could easily be the same number again or more.
The stock market goes from one extreme to the other, but at some point this year I'm convinced it will dawn on enough people to get us back into the FT250.
We are overdue news. |
No, but Pippa did work for OXB...
Pippa Radcliffe
Client Programme Directo
Oxford BioMedica
Oct 1999 - Feb 2024 · 24 yrs 5 mos |
Do wives and girlfriends of OXB employees get options even though they don't work for OXB? |
The recent RNS reference BR holdings.
I hope everyone here is patient. From experience this stock will be purposely depressed for a few years.
There is an upside though, further down the track. |
It is frustrating, but I think when they do their next trading update it will be good news. They are probably trying to get ducks in line and a strong foundation before switching on the news tap. |
Well, there is no question this board have driven away any interest at all in investing in this company. No news. No publicity. No buyers.
Shame. |
Thanks Phil, enzymes seem to be cropping up a lot of late. |
Asked AI to explain it, seems to be related to enzymes:
The study explored how breaking down certain molecules, called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), in cell cultures can help make gene therapy vectors more efficiently. Researchers found that treating these cultures with an enzyme called chondroitinase ABC increased the production of these vectors significantly. This method could improve how we produce tools needed for gene therapy, making the process faster and more effective. |
OXB research paper published today
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol., 26 June 2024
Sec. Bioprocess Engineering
Volume 12 - 2024 |
Degradation of specific glycosaminoglycans improves transfection efficiency and vector production in transient lentiviral vector manufacturing processes
Seems to be about process improvement in LentiVector production, but honestly well beyond my abilities. |
The T-Charge paper:-
PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF AN OPEN-LABEL, MULTICENTRE, PHASE 1/2 STUDY TO ASSESS SAFETY, EFFICACY AND CELLULAR KINETICS OF YTB323 (RAPCABTAGENE AUTOLEUCEL), A RAPIDLY MANUFACTURED CAR T-CELL THERAPY TARGETING CD19 ON B CELLS, FOR SEVERE REFRACTORY SYSTEMIC LUPUS ERYTHEMATOSUS |
Pleased to see the AGM Q andA is on the OXB site.Surprised there were so few questions but mine re dividends did get a measured response |
June 2024 Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 83 (Suppl 1):327.1-328
This is early data from one of the T-Charge trials (direct CAR-T) which we partner Novartis with (top left on this link ).
"Conclusion Preliminary data from this clinical trial suggest favourable safety, CAR T-cell expansion, B-cell depletion and initial efficacy of YTB323 in srSLE, supporting its continued evaluation. Data from additional enrolled patients and continued follow-up are being generated as the study progresses." |
H1 year end on Friday and although an outsider would never guess by looking at the share price, a pretty good one.
Just a quick recap:-
First and foremost, the completion of the ABL purchase - a bit delayed but without incident at the end of January.
Beginning of March the 3 year revenue CAGR forecast increased to more than 35%, up from prior guidance of more than 30%.
20th March the new (but currently still secret) commercial deal to produce vector for a multiple myeloma CAR-T company, 2 new projects with existing clients and a new partnership in cardiac gene therapy.
End of March was the results with an increase of 54% in contracted value of client orders signed and an increase of 51% in the business development pipeline. Forecast for roughly breakeven this year. 35 clients and 51 programmes as of April 2024 (April 2023 was 18 clients and 34 programmes).
18th June, the final 20m Euros from IM in exchange for new shares as part of the ABL deal.
It's all going very nicely. More news would be even nicer, but as OXB have previously told us - what they can and can't say is mostly at the whim of our partners (who are of course the paying customers). I think likely now that shortly we will get news in the "no buses for ages then 3 at once" fashion.
Regular readers will remember that I had hoped the "industry standard KPI table" (as flashed by Roch in his state of the nation address) was going to be the vehicle for shareholder reassurance, but as of today we still have no idea of where, when and what this "updated regularly" actually means.
Meanwhile France is now on the OXB main website as "other vectors" |
Needs a scientist to be sure Phil, but 37 employees is a tiny company if that figure is correct and their lab is at the north pole?Sounds a very part time job for Frank to me, but if there is a better mousetrap in it for OXB then great. |
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