How to Find the Right Value for a Biotech Stock

Biotech valuation methods

Anyone investing in biotech stocks will be faced with the challenge of finding the right price for a company’s shares. Experts share their most reliable valuation methods. 

In part one of this series, we looked at how a biotech investor should look into many qualitative aspects of a biotech company’s business plan to decide if it is a good investment. In this second part, we will explore some of the most popular valuation methods experts use to determine the right price for a biotech stock, and how they decide if it’s worth investing in. 

Unfortunately, there is no single formula that can condense the multiple parameters influencing a biotech stock — market potential, cash burn rate, the management team, the business strategy, intellectual property, and even unpredictable events such as a global pandemic. Still, the information gathered by investors can be translated into reasonable assumptions that can then be used to get a good idea of the worth of a particular investment in a biotech stock.

Particularly for the valuation of early-stage projects, technical knowledge is important,” noted Peter Abelin, Life Science Senior Consultant at the Danish valuation consultancy firm Xplico. Knowing well the potential of the technology being developed and how it compares to what is on the market or under development by competitors is a good first step to determine how likely a product is to make it to the market — and take a big enough share of it. 

Investing in early-stage companies is risky; during the years it takes to get a drug through research, clinical trials, and regulatory review, the drug candidate can fail at any time. The earlier an investor gets in, the more chances a particular product candidate will not make it through to commercialization. But if the product makes it to market, the potential return will be much higher. Generally, the closer to the sales stage, the lower the risk for the investor, but also the lower potential financial returns. 

Go with tradition: the net present value

The most traditional way of calculating the value of a company is by determining its net present value, or discounted cash flow. This basically consists of determining the future cash flow of a company after a certain period of time, and discounting that value to take into account the risk that the company will not be able to make it to the stage where those sales become a reality. 

To estimate the future cash flow, it is necessary to forecast the sales of a drug based on the expected market share and its price. The amount that is forecasted to be spent on running the company’s operations is then subtracted from the projected earnings. In case the plan is to license the drug to a pharma company, the revenues will only be a percentage of sales, but the operating costs will also be significantly reduced.

Discount is a key concept in biotech valuation. In financial jargon, it refers to determining the present value of a payment that is to be received in the future. In other words, it estimates the current value of a business based on its expected future cash flow.

Generally, an investor is willing to pay less when the risk is higher, so bigger risks come along with higher discount rates. The more mature the company, the lower the discount.

There is no unique way to calculate a discount rate, but it is mostly based on the company’s cost of capital. That is, the cost of the equity and debt needed for the company to complete its goals and make revenues that are higher than what was originally spent.

Discount rates in the pharma and biotech industries can vary a lot. For early-stage projects, the discount rate can reach up to 50%, reflecting the small chance to become one day a profitable business. As a drug reaches late-stage clinical trials, the discount gets closer to 20%. And for big, stable pharma companies, the discount rate is often between 10 and 15%. 

It should be noted that the fact that biotech valuation uses numbers does not mean it is a science. Some analysts caution about the subjective assumptions that are implicit in some valuation estimations, starting from calculating the discount rate.

Calculating the next present value has been the usual procedure for biotech stock valuation for years, mainly due to its simplicity. However, it often only looks at the best-case scenario, in some cases relying on forecasts of cash flows that do not exist yet and on optimist predictions of R&D costs.

Dig into the detail: the risk-adjusted net present value

In the face of the limitations of calculating the net present value of a biotech company, the current standard valuation method in the drug development industry is the risk-adjusted net present value (rNPV). This method takes into account the probability that the predictions on future cash flow will not occur. 

“The risk-adjusted net present value is quite easy and quick to implement, also because it is understood by everybody in the financial markets,” said Damien Choplain, Senior Biotech Equity Analyst at the French financial services company Kepler Cheuvreux. “In my opinion, the best option to evaluate a biotech or a drug is to build a robust and detailed rNPV model and validate each top-line assumption with key opinion leaders.”

Projects with significant uncertainty regarding their success, such as drugs, medical devices, and diagnostics, require careful consideration of risk at multiple points in the project’s lifecycle. To perform the risk adjustment, it is possible to use historical information of the success rate of similar products in the industry at different stages of development.

“Although there is probably not a better biotech stock valuation metric than common sense and experience, rNPV is a nice way of calculating an order of magnitude for a mid- to late-stage project,” said Jan de Kerpel, Managing Director of Life Sciences & Healthcare at the Dutch bank Kempen Corporate Finance. However, “early clinical or preclinical [stages] are not well served by this technique as certain parameters can have a massive impact on the future value.”

A key advantage of the rNPV method is that it can take into account the fact that the risk of a product candidate being developed by a biotech company is always linked to discrete milestone events, such as the successful completion of clinical trials or the process of obtaining regulatory approval.

By spreading probabilities over more variables you get a better sense of what determines success and what creates value,” Abelin pointed out. That can include other intangible factors, such as “comparisons with what investors have been willing to pay, or looking at which development step creates the most value, such as when they strike a deal.”

We also check the relevance of the outcome by comparing it with a market value of listed companies and deals struck by similar companies. We use a more or less standardized discount rate of 10-15%. Standardization in itself, with a real-life check, is valuable. Several others would use the same numbers. What something is worth is the result of value creation paired with a documented market interest in the product,” Abelin concluded.

Searching for more accurate valuation methods 

Another valuation method is the real options method, which is used to analyze the consequences of possible decisions. For example, a company contemplating the option to expand or the option to abandon a project. Another is the Monte Carlo method, a simulation tool for considering all possible combinations of events, and quite popular in financial circles. However not all analysts in the biotech sector like it.

 “In my view, Monte Carlo is useless in the context of biotech, for publicly listed biotech companies at least. Keep in mind that a target price is ‘directional’ at least for small- and mid-cap biotech,” Choplain warned. “It is almost impossible to know which probability distribution you should apply to your different parameters. I used this method only once in the context of a company acquisition”.

The demand for more accurate valuations will continue to grow in the biotech industry, particularly for methods that consider flexibility and that can properly evaluate the commercialization stage too.

The latest generation of biotech valuation models is supported by software to run thousands of simulations, creating variations for all the inputs that the analyst might want to include, such as R&D costs or a product’s potential market share. 

Valuation assessment will become more sophisticated and more granular, hence biotech valuation will have to combine scientific and clinical expertise and go-to-market and commercial expertise,” said de Kerpel. “All the technicalities of a small-mid cap public company that is often in need of cash has to be taken into account.” 

While there is no guarantee, supporting an evaluation with numerical calculations may help to develop a much clearer picture of a stock’s potential future. Usually, this becomes easier the more advanced the pipeline is, as there is more data available to support a prediction.

In this context, it is important to consider how valuable the technology a company is developing will be in the future. Over time, a biotech’s stock can be impacted, among other factors, by patent protection, competitors, technological changes, government regulations, currency exchange rates, or even broader trends such as economic and political crises. 

“It is important to make an assessment of the potential of a product: commercial, competitors, risk to market, interest from a big player, etc. and build from there. Trust in management, trading liquidity, near-term newsflow, backup plans, financial position, and trading of peers are very important to anticipate trading movements,” de Kerpel summarized.

Explore other topics: Regulatory approval

Newsletter Signup - Under Article / In Page

"*" indicates required fields

Subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest biotech news!

Name*
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Labiotech.eu

Suggested Articles

Show More