Scaling up a Company to $10bn-$20bn
Europe is missing many companies scaled up to this market cap bracket, partly because any pretenders to the title have been acquired. So, what are the key characteristics a $10bn-$20bn therapeutic company is likely to need?
- Unencumbered assets – to help leverage deals and M&A
- Platform or pipeline to diversify risk
- Genuine commercial ambitions, held early-on in the Company’s development
- International business or at least in the USA or China
- Usually has to be a public company, though there are exceptions e.g. Moderna Therapeutics. Apparently, leadership of existing large Companies has expressed a preference for IPO-ing and financing via NASDAQ which led to the age-old discussion and conundrum of whether this tendency to move for US funding matters and if there is or is not enough capital for high tech life sciences companies to grow available from European investors. It was highlighted that tax incentives for private and public investors as well as requiring certain investment funds to commit a proportion (10% in the US in some circumstances) of their investment to early stage companies is helpful but there is no organised program to make capital access easier for smaller, European life science companies to drive growth
- Execute M&A – very few big companies end up at $10bn-$20bn without acquiring other businesses and changing or adding to what they do
- Leadership that is ambitious, experienced, able to scale in advance of growth and capable of handling change
- Aligned supportive investors
- Luck & timing
