NEW YORK, April 4 – Informax expects to report first quarter 2001 revenues of $6.5 million, double the $3.2 million in revenues it reported for the year ago quarter, but expects losses to be significantly wider than Wall Street’s expectations, the company said Wednesday.
Informax will report losses of between 20 and 22 cents per share, compared to a net loss of 31 cents per share for the same quarter of 2000. While these losses are narrowing, they are double Wall Street’s expected losses of 11 cents per share, according to a survey of six brokers conducted by FirstCall/Thomson Financial.
Informax attributed these greater-than-expected losses to relocation expenses for its headquarters, severance pay due to management changes, balance sheet write-offs for some fixed assets and receivables; as well as higher than anticipated sales, marketing, and R&D expenses.
The company said this trend in losses would continue throughout 2001, and predicted its losses for the year to be between 63 and 69 cents per share, double the 37 cents per share in FirstCall/Thomson Financial’s consensus estimate of Wall Street brokers. The 2001 losses would be affected by the exercise of stock options in the first quarter, the company said.
Informax, however, still expects to reach profitability by the fourth quarter of 2002, said CEO Alex Titomirov.
"Our preliminary revenue and total bookings results for the first quarter reflect continuing strength for both GenoMax, our enterprise bioinformatics platform, and Vector NTI Suite for the desktop," Titomirov said in a statement.
Titomirov also said the company had added six additional customers for GenoMax in the first quarter, and had licensed Vector NTI to a large pharmaceutical company.
Informax will hold a conference call Thursday morning to discuss its expected first quarter financial position, and will report its first quarter results after the close of the market on May 2.