Re:Subprime ‘unicorns’ that do not look a billion dollars
by dbcooper on Saturday October 17, 2015 @03:14AM
(#10403671)
Abaxis (manufacturers of the "Piccolo" systems, which seem to be lab-on-disc based and offer point-of-care operation) are an interesting company to compare to Theranos. They seem to be able to perform small panels of assays (up to 14) on 100 µL samples [1] obtained by venipuncture.[2]
They are valued at $880M, and had ~ $200M revenue and $27M profit in the last financial year.
http://www.abaxis.com/about_us/history.html
[1] http://www.piccoloxpress.com/products/panels/function/
[2] http://www.piccoloxpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015Revision...
Re:Subprime ‘unicorns’ that do not look a billion dollars
by AndrewKemendo on Saturday October 17, 2015 @03:49PM
(#10405787)
They are valued at $880M, and had ~ $200M revenue and $27M profit in the last financial year.
If they were in startup world those numbers would probably make them over $1BN in valuation.
Lab Corp is worth $11 billion. With $6 billion in sales (and having generated ~$1.6 billion in profit over the last three years). The market Theranos is tackling is not as huge as some people apparently would like to think. Lab Corp is a monster in the field, and they're merely doing $11 billion. It's not an Uber situation, where a company blindsides an entire industry, and that industry stands still - Lab Corp has the resources and scale to respond to anything Theranos can do.
In the perfect scenario, Theranos is doing little more than pulling at least a decade of future returns forward at a $9 billion valuation. There's nothing they can do that will generate $6 billion in sales in the next five or six years. Their business model is partially built on neutering the high margins that companies like Lab Corp enjoy.