From $747 million loss to $12.2 billion profit a year later. This is only possible if a company sells corona vaccines in a pandemic.
The American Moderna announced its quarterly and annual figures for 2021 on Thursday† The biotech company has never brought a drug or vaccine to the market before and has grown exceptionally fast. Revenue rose from $571 million to $7.2 billion in the quarter. For the full year, Moderna achieved a turnover of 18.5 billion dollars (16.6 billion euros) and therefore a net profit of no less than 12.2 billion (10.9 billion euros).
Moderna expects a turnover of 19 billion dollars for next year. In total, Moderna delivered 807 million doses of vaccine last year. By comparison, leader Pfizer delivered 3 billion.
There are now three thousand people working at Moderna, at the beginning of 2020 there were still eight hundred. The company is ‘only’ eleven years old, where Pfizer has been around for more than one hundred and seventy years.
Moderna was founded to develop a medicine based on mRNA, a principle that has been scientifically researched for years. The name Moderna comes from ‘modified’ and ‘rna’. It started at about the same time as the German company BioNTech, which invented the vaccine that Pfizer would eventually market.
Mysterious
Despite BioNTech and Moderna making similar vaccines, they are completely different companies. In the early years, Moderna was secretive about the results it achieved, but managed to secure huge investments. BioNTech was frank and published extensively in scientific journals.
Where the CEO of BioNTech (himself a scientist) came to work on an old bicycle, in 2011 Moderna recruited a true entrepreneur as the CEO. Namely the Frenchman Stéphane Bancel (49), who studied chemical engineering and an MBA from Harvard. Bancel had been chairman of the board since he was 34, at the time of the French medical research company bioMérieux.
The American Medical News Site status conducted research into the culture within Moderna in 2016† Many employees described the atmosphere as bad, and Bancel as particularly strict. Working days were long, and employees and managers in the company were replaced at random. If an experiment or study failed, it could mean instant dismissal.
Bancel, a good seller, meanwhile managed to raise billions in capital for research. In 2013, Moderna (then only 25 employees) secured a $240 million partnership with AstraZeneca. The confidence of the British pharmaceutical giant attracted a lot of investor attention, and subsequent investment rounds yielded hundreds of millions time and again.
Also read: Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer made billions with a vaccine it didn’t invent itself
After years of toil, both BioNTech and Moderna found it difficult to use mRNA as a medicine, and switched to vaccine development. When reports came from China of an epidemic, they quickly got to work. In early January 2021, Moderna’s vaccine was approved in Europe, right after Pfizer’s. Due to a large number of shares in Moderna, Bancel is now worth 4.5 billion dollars, according to Forbes.
New branches
In the coming years, Moderna wants to open four new branches in Asia and six in Europe, including one in the Netherlands. A Moderna production line is already being started up at the Chemelot industrial estate in Geleen.
Outside of corona, Moderna is working on a few dozen potential vaccines. For example, it hopes to develop vaccines against cancer, heart disease and the Zika virus. The company has high hopes for the combination of a flu and corona vaccine, in one dose. The combination vaccine will be tested on humans for the first time in the spring.