Electric Eel Express Article / Yang Li
Recently, the major shareholders of 000710.sz have reduced their holdings, and the company's performance continues the decline in 2020. However, the company's vigorous investment in research and development is worthy of recognition, and industry analysts expect the company's new products to be released in the future.
Sluggish performance Major shareholders reduced their holdings
On November 4, Berry Gene issued an announcement that, as of the date of the announcement, Tianjin Junruiqi Equity Investment Partnership (Limited Partnership) (hereinafter referred to as Junruiqi), a shareholder holding 17.73 million shares of the listed company (accounting for about 5% of the total share capital of the Company), plans to reduce its holding of no more than 3.55 million shares of the Company (accounting for about 1% of the total share capital of the Company) in a centralized auction transaction from November 25, 2021 (inclusive) to February 24, 2022 (inclusive), It is planned to reduce the number of shares of the Company by way of block transactions from November 9, 2021 (inclusive) to February 8, 2022 (inclusive), not more than 7.09 million shares (representing approximately 2% of the total share capital of the Company), and the total amount of the above reduction will not exceed 1064 shares (representing approximately 3.00% of the total share capital of the Company).
Electric Eel Express also noted that another major shareholder of Berry Gene is also reducing its stake in listed companies. On October 21, Berry Gene announced that Honghu Siqi (Zhuhai), a shareholder holding 30 million shares of the listed company (accounting for 8.4601% of the total share capital of the company), plans to reduce its shareholding in the company by no more than 21.28 million shares (accounting for no more than 6% of the total share capital of the company) from November 12, 2021 (inclusive) to May 11, 2022 (inclusive).
Why major shareholders are in a hurry to sell their stake in Berry Gene, whether this is related to the company's current performance. Berry Gene's performance forecast for the first three quarters of this year released on October 30 showed that the company expects to lose 60-90 million yuan for the whole year.
As for the reasons for the performance loss, Berry Gene explained in the performance forecast that first, during the reporting period, the company provided solutions based on "personalized customized services" for scientific research customers (including but not limited to universities, research institutes, and clinical institutions). With the conclusion of the customer's previous research projects and the reduction of phased scientific research service procurement, it is expected that the company's basic scientific research service revenue and gross profit will show a downward trend.
During the reporting period, the number of hospital patients recovered slowly in the post-epidemic stage, the growth rate of the number of prenatal tests slowed down, and the intensification of market competition led to a decline in test prices, and it is expected that the company's medical testing service revenue will decline significantly, and the company's overall performance will be greatly affected.
During the reporting period, with the continuous acceptance of genetic testing by consumers and medical institutions, the business penetration rate continues to grow, and it is expected that the company's nextseqcn500 equipment sales will achieve substantial growth, and will drive the company's genetic, tumor, microbial business line related reagent sales, but due to the low gross profit margin level of equipment sales, it is expected that the company's overall performance has not improved significantly.
During the reporting period, the company implemented equity incentives, and it is expected that the impact of related share payment expenses on the company's net profit will be about 27.94 million yuan.
During the reporting period, the company expects to recognize an investment loss of about 62 million yuan for the whole year to invest in subsidiaries such as Fujian Herui Gene Technology Co., Ltd.
R & D investment is worth affirming The amount of new products is worth looking forward to
According to the semi-annual report, the main business of Berry Gene is genetic testing services and the sale of equipment and reagents based on high-throughput sequencing technology. In the first half of this year, 23.91% of the company's revenue came from basic scientific research services, 36.15% from medical testing services, 27.6% from reagent sales, 7.04% from equipment sales, and 5.3% from others.
From 2017 to 2020, the company's net profit after deducting non-deductions was 224 million yuan, 254 million yuan, 294 million yuan and 115 million yuan, respectively, and the growth rate of net profit after deducting non-deductions was 57.81%, 13.01%, 15.87% and -61.03% respectively.
In the first three quarters of this year, the research and development expenses of Berry Gene were 91.27 million yuan, an increase of 21% year-on-year. In 2019 and 2020, the company's R&D investment was 124 million yuan and 129 million yuan, and the proportion of R&D investment in operating income in the same period was 7.67% and 8.4%.
Although the company's performance has declined in 2020 and this situation may continue this year, the company's investment in research and development is worthy of recognition. Industry analysts believe that Berry Gene and its shareholding subsidiaries launched the liver cancer early screening product Laisin in August 2020, which is the largest, fastest progress and best data in the global similar research, and has provided testing services in nearly 20 hospitals in cooperation, and entered the first "Expert Consensus on Early Screening Strategies for Liver Cancer in China" in June 2021, which was included in the "pyramid" mode of early screening of liver cancer, and the sensitivity to distinguish between liver cancer and non-liver cancer can reach 95.42%, and the specificity is 97.91%. High reproducibility, independent of the liver history, clinical pathological features, and geographic location of the screened subjects, outperformed existing afp/dcp in screening and diagnosis of very early/early liver cancer.
In addition, after several years of research and development reserves, Berry Gene has gradually enriched its product pipeline, and new products such as Bebian Plus (niptplus), Konoan (cnv), all-exon sequencing (wes) and three generations of land poverty detection are expected to be released in the process of successive certification and approval. The company's Novaseq6000, which it has partnered with Illumina, and the Sequencei III sequencer, which pacbio has partnered with, have already started the registration filing process.