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It can be tricky to put a price tag on biotechnology companies that offer little more than the promise of success in the future. Just because someone in the lab cries "Eureka!", that doesn't necessarily mean that a cure has been found. In the biotech sector, it can take many years to determine whether all the effort will translate into returns for a company. But while valuation may appear to be more guesswork than science, there is a generally accepted approach to valuing biotech companies that are years away from payoff. In this article, we explain this valuation approach, which relies on discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis, and take you through the process step by step.
Portfolio Valuation Approach
Think of a biotech company as a collection of one or more experimental drugs, each representing a potential market opportunity. The idea is to treat each promising drug as a mini-company within a portfolio. Using DCF analysis, you can determine what someone would be willing to pay for that drug portfolio.
In other words, you determine the forecasted free cash flow of each drug to establish its separate present value. Then, you add together the net present value of each drug, along with any cash in the bank, and come up with a fair value for what the whole company is worth today. (To learn more, see our Discounted Cash Flow Analysis tutorial.)
A biotech company can have dozens, or even hundreds, of drugs in its developmental pipeline. But that does not mean you should include them all in your valuation. Generally speaking, you should only include those drugs that are already in one of the three clinical trial stages. (For more information, visit the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's website.) As an investment, a drug that is in the discovery or pre-clinical stage is a very risky proposition, with less than a 1% chance of getting to market (according to an industry report published in 2003 by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America). So, drugs in the pre-clinical stage are usually assigned zero value by public market investors.
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