By Rob Spurr and Simon Murphy
This article resulted from a site visit and interviews with Alastair Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Avacta.
By some observations and in some people’s eyes, Avacta has been a perennial disappointer from an investment perspective. Indeed, over a period of three years and two previous articles there have been highs and lows (and not just in the share price). However, during this period Avacta has still evolved and now looks substantially different to what was written about back in 2010. Something else has changed too; the size of the combined opportunity in front of the company is now also much larger, and the company is closer than ever to exploiting, in a meaningful way, the multiple opportunities that they have identified.
Avacta has three divisions; Avacta Animal Health (providing laboratory and in-clinic diagnostics to the veterinary market); Avacta Analytical (providing analytical instrumentation and consumables to the biopharmaceutical industry) and the recently created Avacta Life Sciences (to commercialise its Affimer technology which resulted from the acquisition of Aptuscan). A number of milestones have been achieved in all three businesses.
Avacta has two large units in Thorp Arch Estate, Wetherby, having expanded from their original unit, leading them to move their administration; customer service and executive management team out to a second unit and concentrate their laboratories in the original unit. Avacta's offices and laboratories are quite homely, nothing too flash, much like their Yorkshire roots - nothing is spent on expensive corporate fit outs; everything is functional.
New laboratories and increased staff numbers accounted for most of this expansion (2010 - 50 employees, 2013 - 70 employees), with Avacta assembling and extending the range of competencies, from customer service through to highly specialised science. Obviously this brings an increase in the cost base, but the company now has the resources and human capital in place to more effectively address the global opportunities that lay before them.
New Blood - Key appointment of Dr Matt Johnson
To add to the case that Avacta has actually evolved into something more credible and very promising; Avacta recently announced a new key appointment to their Affimer technology and production team - Dr Matt Johnson. This is particularly important, as Dr Johnson was Head of Research and Development at Abcam PLC, a successful £1bn market cap supplier of antibodies, proteins, peptides and immunoassays to the global Life…
