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Employees at Biontech: The industry attracts billions in investments.
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Stefan Albrecht / Biontech / dpa
Never before has so much money flowed into the German biotechnology industry as last year - mainly because of the two vaccine developers Biontech and Curevac.
The biotech industry collected more than three billion euros through capital increases, the stock exchange or financial investors in the first year of the corona crisis, as the industry association, the biotechnology industry organization (Bio Germany), announced on Thursday.
That was more than three times as much money as in 2019 and more than twice as much as in 2018. However, around half of this funding last year went exclusively to Biontech and Curevac, which collected around 1.5 billion euros.
300 million euros of this comes from the federal government's holdings in Curevac.
Too few private investors
"Conversely, that means that the remaining billions will be divided among hundreds of other companies," said the association's chairman, Oliver Schacht, on Thursday in Berlin.
He would therefore like to see more such lighthouses in Germany and more courageous investors.
Because compared to the USA, private investors in Germany are much more cautious due to the high capital requirements and risk of default.
"The pandemic has now brought a disruptive change," said the managing director of Bio Germany, Viola Bronsema.
The visibility and appreciation of the industry has increased significantly due to the corona crisis.
But Germany needs more investors like the SAP founder Dietmar Hopp and the Strüngmann brothers, who have supported companies like the Tübingen vaccine developer Curevac and Biontech with millions when they were not yet known to the general public.
There is not enough money for large companies
While there are still numerous funding opportunities from the federal government for young start-ups and companies in the early research stage, a funding gap often arises in later phases.
"We are historically weak when it comes to making companies big," said Schacht.
There is often a lack of money for capital-intensive phases, such as large-scale studies or the construction of production lines.
This is another reason why IPOs are rare in Germany.
The companies are lacking in size.
"We have more listed biotech companies in the US than in Germany as a whole," said Schacht.
Politicians should not make it unnecessarily difficult, especially for investors from outside the EU, the association therefore demanded.
Funding pools would also have to be better adapted to the industry.
Biotech companies, for example, often fell through the cracks because they did not have the necessary equity base.
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