Opinions
Robert McWhirter
Prometic Life Sciences Inc.
PLI-T
COMMENT
Jan 05, 2018
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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He believes this has been very volatile due to an overhang and the potential need for more financing. It is stabilizing now and they have received an investment from the Thompson family. He thinks they should begin to receive approval soon with sales later this year. They do not own it presently, although they have held it in the past.
He is short this company presently. The market cap is quite high compared to his estimate of value. The company appears to be quite promotional compared to others. Their plasma protein product is easy to get through the FDA and subject to hype at each easy approval stage. He does not see revenues and earnings to back it up.
They have patents on plasma protein drugs that are interesting. The company had significant success pushing these through the FDA stages but they recently ran into a delay and the stock dropped precipitously. He has been short for a while thinking the market cap was overvalued for the ultimate end market they were pursuing. Now that the stock has dropped so much, his short position is smaller. This is a highly speculative position.
The near to intermediate term is a bit of a challenge. They have technology to extract proteins from a bag of plasma. Their specialty is that they require a lot less CapX and operating costs to do it, and can end up getting much higher yields. The current process, which is over 40 years old, is maximized and optimized for something totally different in the proteins they were getting. They have approval to get plasminogen. Spending a ton of money to go through the formal drug testing process. It’s not expected to earn any money in 2018, but a loss of $.13 a share. Expected to break even in 2019.