i figure this place beats the stock market forum for advice...

[Boris]

hey i didn't read your OP carefully. I take back everything I said. I thought you were getting in at the most recent financing valuation. if you get shares at the offering price, I have no opinion on what you should do. i feel kind of stupid now.

[astroglide]

i understood where your perspective was coming from. i need to ascertain what price i will actually get today, it's not clear to me either.

[wacki]

Man this thread was buried under a pile of OOT crap.

Asto, I'm not very familiar with that company and there is very little information given on that web site. I will try my best to give you some advice though.

Pro's: The company seems to be investing in the right areas. I believe that unless some technology comes along and blows their technology out of the water, they will have some good products to sell to the biotech community. Keep in mind the information is nowhere near the amount needed for a deep read. I would say the read given from that web site is about as firm as the stats given by 100 hands via poker tracker.

Con's: Pharmaceuticals are volatile. Just because you have good technology doesn't mean you can sell it. Stats are misleading and drugs can explode or die overnight. Pharmaceuticals sales people are notorious for not really understanding their products. They are generally picked for their looks and work ethic over their actual knowledge. Young blond females are particularly popular in this line of work. Biology background is optional.

Pro's: Your company is selling equipment. That stuff pretty much sells itself. Your company is also not in the software business, which is a very good thing because most of the commercial software I've worked with is crap.

Cons: Biotech companies are made or broken by the luck/choices of management. I've seen many managers think they need to concentrate on sales when sales pitches don't effect researchers. Ph.D's are literally professionals when it comes to doing their own homework. If management decides to chop up R&D and hire a bunch of sales people the company is going to crash. The execs will then sell the company and bail with a golden parachute. I've seen this happen more times then I can count within the last 5 years alone.

A lot of things have to come together to make a biotech company work well. But when it works, it usually works very well.

Con: Without going into politics too much, the biotech industry is literally being cut to pieces right now. Bush has cut billions out of the biotech industry in order to help fund the war. I don't know how that is going to effect the stock.

Advice: Be very careful who you get biotech advice from. Many people in the field get super excited over sexy technologies like iRNA when they aren't as promising as you might expect. The potential for many of these simple to explain technologies is huge and execs go crazy over them. However, it takes a very good chemist or biologist to truly understand why many of these "sexy" technologies aren't as good as many like to believe.

My synopsis? Overall I have a good feeling about that company but my read is a shallow one. That company makes equipment for cell line cultures and I have a strong inclination in believing that area will grow in the future. However, I would need to see some hard numbers facts and figures about how much their equipment is going to benefit researchers. Researchers don't buy equipment unless the benefits are very clear. The current condition of federal funding makes me feel uneasy about the investment. Still, I think the cell line cultures area is strong. I've seen many other very small production level companies in this line of work do very well in the last few years. If I were you, I would take whatever data you have that is available to the public and ask a friend that is a "principle investigator" what he or she thinks.

I hope this helps. Good luck.