Moderna shares continued to fall until Friday, as experts questioned whether sales of the company’s coronavirus mRNA vaccine alone would help justify the company’s high valuation, intensifying a downturn that wiped out the 60% of the value of one of the top shares of last year and turned it into the worst performance of 2022.
According to Forbes, Moderna’s share fell 4.4% on Friday to an eight-month low of $ 160, continuing to fall more than 20% last week amid growing research suggesting a booster dose with the vaccine Moderna’s Covid-19, while highly effective against previous strains, was less effective than the rapidly spreading omicron variant.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance on Thursday, Jefferies analyst Michael Yee said the “excessively high expectations” set last year, as the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine became widely available to the public, would “lead to challenges”.
Yee said the recent drop in shares helped align Moderna’s valuation with other biotech competitors, but warned that analysts increasingly expected sales of the Covid vaccine – currently Moderna’s only source of revenue from a marketable product – will decline in the coming years as the pandemic becomes endemic and competition between treatment and prevention options intensifies.
Bank of America analyst Geoff Meacham told investors in a note Friday that its valuation has now “landed” after rising sharply during the pandemic.
Meacham said he was now focusing on the company’s revenue streams beyond Covid (Moderna is also developing a flu vaccine), citing the company’s huge $ 17 billion capital as a source of “strategic” opportunity.
In a note on Friday, UBS analyst Eliana Merle was more optimistic about Moderna’s prospects, describing its mRNA technology as a turning point in the vaccine market and saying that its success with the Covid-19 vaccine suggests a high chance of success for other vaccine targets.
Moderna shares fell 67 percent from a record high of $ 484 on Aug. 9, draining about $ 133 billion from the company, which now stands at about $ 65 billion.
Although the number of coronavirus infections has skyrocketed amid a wave of pandemic caused by the Omicron strain, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday that Moderna and Pfizer boosts were 90%. effective in preventing the hospitalization of individuals infected with the new variant.
Although the share of Moderna jumped by 143% to land in the third best rise of the S&P 500 in 2021, it has fallen by 35% this year. By comparison, Devon Energy and Marathon Oil, the stocks with the best and second best performance last year at S&P, have risen 7% and 11% this year, respectively.
Source: Forbes
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