EActually, companies can do whatever they want with their profits. You can invest them, buy back your shares, some pay them out as dividends and bonuses to employees and shareholders, others use it to prepare for takeovers. BioNTech was also faced with such options after the manufacturer of the Covid-19 vaccine Comirnaty reported a profit of 1.1 billion euros in the first quarter.
Now the listed company has announced that it will invest the profits in research. The Mainz-based company wants to develop nothing less than a vaccine against malaria. According to the World Health Organization, more than 400,000 patients die from the disease every year, two thirds of them are small children. The company also wants to set up production facilities for the vaccine in Africa.
150 million through the IPO alone
Exactly how much BioNTech will actually put into the development of a malaria vaccine has not yet been announced. Company founder Ugur Sahin only spoke of “substantial investments”. But it should help to remember what vaccine development has cost so far – and also who has mainly paid for it so far. The state, as the figures show, was a much smaller part. Even if some politicians suggest otherwise.
BioNTech was founded in Mainz in 2008 by three medical professionals, including the couple Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, who then researched mRNA technology for cancer treatment. The company was initially financed by the Hexal founders Andreas and Thomas Strüngmann with around 150 million euros. Further sums came from the founding couple themselves over the years: they founded the antibody company Ganymede in 2001 and were able to sell it to a Japanese company in 2016 for 422 million euros. In the summer of 2019 BioNTech collected the equivalent of 275 million euros from private investors. The IPO in the fall of 2019 raised another $ 150 million from investors. There were also several cooperation agreements with other companies, for example Sanofi transferred € 26 million in 2015 alone, and the American chemical company Eli Lilly transferred € 60 million.
300 million euros loss by the end of 2019
All this money was needed, it was used for research as well as for taking over other companies. In the three years up to the IPO alone, the company, which had grown to 1,300 employees by the end of 2019, had a pre-tax loss of more than 300 million euros.
And the state? Between 2007 and 2013, the Federal Ministry of Research paid out a total of 2.9 million euros to the Mainz University through the Go Bio funding program, and another 1.2 million went to the University of Mainz, where Sahin taught and researched. The German Research Foundation has funded three special research areas and a graduate college, in which the physician Sahin was also involved. At the Collaborative Research Center 432, which was located at the University of Mainz and received a total of 17 million euros from the DFG, he and his wife were in charge of four of 39 sub-projects.
The federal government did not transfer the largest amount by far to BioNTech until September 2020: 375 million euros were intended to facilitate the clinical studies of the vaccine required for approval and the rapid development of vaccine production. How exactly BioNTech used the sum was not communicated, but in September the company bought a Novartis vaccine plant in Marburg, including the 400 skilled workers employed there. In April 2021, after more than half a year of retooling, production could finally start, and the plant should be able to manufacture more than a billion cans per year.
BioNTech has now paid back these funding amounts – with a return: of the pre-tax profit of 1.6 billion euros in the first quarter, 514 million euros flowed to the state as tax.
The result of all these investments: BioNTech, together with its production partner Pfizer, had already delivered around 74 million vaccine doses to Germany by the end of July, three quarters of all doses that have been administered in Germany to date. The price per dose: 15.50 euros.
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