BofA Securities: there’s hardly any upside in CureVac this year

Shares of CureVac N.V. (NASDAQ: CVAC) closed nearly 15% down on Friday after BofA Securities said there isn’t much in the books this year for shareholders of the German biopharmaceutical company.

Geoff Meacham slashed his price target to $20

In a note this morning, BofA Securities’ Geoff Meacham downgraded CureVac to “underperform” and slashed his price target to $20 – roughly the same at which the stock opened on Friday. Previously, he had a PT of $55 on CVAC.

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According to the analyst, the existing COVID-19 vaccines and oral therapeutics are sufficient to meet the global demand, leaving limited upside for CureVac in this space. He wrote:

We think there are minimal vaccine market opportunities left for CureVac to capitalize on. Furthermore, with recent underperformance on many COVID-19 vaccine makers, we think investors have started to move on from COVID-19 vaccine trades.

The German company withdrew application to market its first-gen COVID vaccine in Europe last year and committed to the second-gen mRNA vaccine it is developing in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline.

CureVac’s non-COVID pipeline isn’t exciting either

Meacham also warns that the rest of the company’s pipeline doesn’t look very promising either for 2022, which is why the stock price is unlikely to go up much. In his note, he said:

The development of its non-COVID pipeline has been slower, taking a back seat to CVnCoV and CV2CoV. With this in mind, we don’t think incremental updates from CV8102 or initiation of clinical trials for the flu vaccine provide enough pipeline de-risking to drive meaningful upside.

On the flip side, JMP Securities has a starkly different outlook on CVAC. It initiated the stock at “outperform” this week with a PT of $52 or roughly 175% upside from here.