Tue, Apr 23rd 2024
The Swiss biotech sector saw record-breaking growth last year.
The Swiss biotech sector with further records last year. Not only did the sector achieve record sales. The inflow of capital also increased by more than half.
According to the annual Swiss Biotech Report, the industry recorded record sales of CHF 7.3 billion in 2023, an increase of half a billion compared to 2022.
This is due to significant cooperation and licensing agreements in which Swiss biotech companies successfully collaborate with large pharmaceutical companies.
As well as product sales being boosted by a record number of approvals from Swissmedic, EMA, FDA and other global regulatory authorities.
The sector raised more than 2 billion in capital, an increase of half compared to the previous year. Around 1.4 billion of this flowed into listed companies and 600 million into privately financed companies.
This means that the situation is slowly returning to a more normal level, especially for listed companies, after the two outlier years of 2020 and 2021.
“Listed biotech companies have felt the effects of the sometimes more difficult conditions in the industry worldwide,” says Frederik Schmachtenberg, EY Partner, in an interview with AWP.
Privately held companies have not been so badly affected by this. On the contrary, they saw a clear increase in inflows last year, as the Biotech Report shows.
This also had the positive effect that they increased their expenditure on research and development and generally improved their liquidity reserves, the expert continued.
For listed companies, on the other hand, the Covid-19 pandemic had triggered a kind of gold-rush mood. Companies went public in droves over the years, especially in the USA, even though the respective pipelines did not yet allow for such a move.
In terms of jobs, Swiss R&D biotech companies employed more than 19,000 people in 2023, roughly the same number as in the previous year. A slight increase in jobs at private companies and a slight reduction at listed companies roughly balanced each other out.
he prospect of falling interest rates should also bring some relief for biotech companies. And even if the IPO pipeline in Switzerland is currently still empty, it is quite conceivable that it will fill up as the year progresses.
According to Schmachtenberg, takeovers or license deals are another option. Here too, falling interest rates could provide some relief in terms of financing.
In Switzerland, the majority of biotech companies are not listed on the stock exchange. According to Altorfer, around 95% of biotech companies here are privately owned.
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