In two short months the number of publicly-traded bioinformatics companies has jumped from zero to four. Herewith, a quick take on valuations to date.
Lion and Compugen debuted in August, Genomica in September, and InforMax in October. And at press time their combined market capitalization was an impressive $2.86 billion — not bad for companies with aggregate annual revenues of less than $30 million. As a group the share price/revenue ratio is about 105.
At this point Lion has, well, the lion’s share of the group’s market cap ¯ 59 percent of the total ¯ while InforMax accounts for al-most half of the group’s revenue. Lion has a princely price/ revenue ratio of 180 while InforMax has a relatively plebeian 30.
Genomica, however, puts up the king of the ratios ¯ close to 280 ¯ with a market cap of $425 million on less than $2 million of revenue.
NetGenics and DoubleTwist are still in the IPO pipeline and (if ratios hold) should push the group well over the $3 billion market cap mark. Together their annualized revenues are over $7 million, so the group’s average price/revenue ratio of 105 should give them a market cap of over three quarters of a billion.
Index Update: Two additions this month: Genomica and Ciphergen, both of which launched their IPOs on the last trading day of September. InforMax, which launched the first week of October, will join the Index next month.
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