sla is presently at the top of the charts - I just wonder if it can crack the intrayear high by friday.... 1e 1.30 :)
Market Pulse Monthly: Believe it or not, some companies are going up…
Nick Evans Tuesday, 2 September 2008
IT CAN be hard to sort the long-term winners from the short-term bolters in the notoriously volatile life science sector – so who is adding value in biotech’s annus horribilus? BTN editor Nick Evans takes a longer-term look at the fortunes of the sector’s listed companies.
TABLE: The 15 best and 15 worst life science performers on the ASX in August
Even in what is generally regarded as one of the worst years on record for the life science sector, there is money to be made in trading life science stocks.
While the damage the credit crisis does to the long-term value of the sector is yet to really be assessed, there has been plenty of upwards movement in individual stocks over the last month – and even, in a few rare and lucky cases, over the course of the last 12 months.
Of the 147 companies on BTN’s life science watchlist, 57 will have shareholders who were slightly happier at the end of August than they were at the end of July.
Fifty-seven companies made gains last month, 70 fell, and 20 remained unchanged or untraded (although one of those 20 was long-term hospital case Chemeq, so it should really be 19).
Looking at last month’s movers, the clearest signal is the power of the overhang to depress stocks, regardless of clinical progress.
Of the top 10 movers last month, three were companies which saw a significant number of shares caught up in the Opes Prime debacle earlier this year, and all of them announced in August that the ANZ Bank had finished selling the bulk of the shares seized by the bank after the collapse of Opes Prime.
Solagran was the worst hit of the Opes Prime companies – and the biggest mover of August, with shares nearly doubling over the month from 29.5c at the end of July to 57c at the end of August.
The value of Solagran is 50% higher than it was three months ago, when ANZ selling was putting real downwards pressure on the price, and exactly half of its $1.14 value 12 months ago.
Virax, similarly, has seen a substantial lift since the end of ANZ selling early in August.
The end of that selling, plus the announcement of the approval of a South African trial of its therapeutic HIV vaccine, has seen the company’s share price lift by 63% over the month, closing Friday at 4.9c – although the company’s share price is only half what it was 12 months ago.
Similarly, a good run of announcements, and the end of ANZ selling, has seen BioProspect’s prospects lift, with shares trading 44.4% above their value of a month ago.
Sun Biomedical has also had a good month, with shares rising steadily to finish 90% (+0.9c) over their July close of 1c.
Peplin rose 47% to 50c over the month, as clinical progression added value to the stock, and Novogen gained the most of the majors, climbing 47% (+50c) over the month to close August at $1.56. Novogen is now only 18% short of where it was at this time last year.
Of the other majors ResMed and Pharmaxis also put on value during the month – ResMed climbed nearly 36% (+$1.42) over the month after announcing surprisingly positive annual results, and Pharmaxis gained 33% (+55c) in August.
It was a sorry tale at the other end, however – Biosignal’s woes cut 53% of the company’s shares price away.
Portland Orthopaedic, similarly, lost 44.7% of its share value, and former market darling Fermiscan is very firmly in the investor doghouse, after shedding 40% of its value in August.
Stem Cell Sciences also lost more ground (-37.5%), as did cash-starved Neuren (-34.2%) and Giaconda (-32%).
And, despite the general doom and gloom in the life science sector, a select few companies have actually made investors money over the last 12 months – 16 of them, to be precise.
At the end of August 2008, Antisense was trading 81.6% above where it was at the end of August 2007, and Living Cell Technologies had lifted 75%.
Other winners over the course of the year included Clover Corp (+73.9%), Prana (+55.6%), Somnomed (+38.9%), CSL (+25.4%), Compumedics (+25%), ChemGenex (+20%), Unilife (+18.4%), Avantogen (+17.6%), Analytica (+17.5%), ever steady Bionomics (+15%), Resonance Health (+14.3%), ResMed (+7.2%) and IDT – but only by the thinnest of margins (0.5%).
The BTN watchlist was assembled with the assistance of Intersuisse and Patersons. All figures and calculations taken from IRESS. Figures quoted are rolling figures with the August 28 close as the fixed point.
SLA Price at posting:
72.5¢ Sentiment: None Disclosure: Held
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