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Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

Analysing companies' finances and value from their financial statements using ratios and formulae
TheMotorcycleBoy
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Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#433715

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » August 10th, 2021, 1:58 pm

After spending sometime thinking about the food science of the future over here, I'm now starting to home in on a few companies for better analysis. Ginkgo Bioworks look very interesting in addition to having a pretty funky soundy name. They seem to be in the process of fusing Biology, Robots and Software together.

Although I arrived at Ginkgo via a search for precision fermentation food factories with high ROCEs, it turns out that Ginkgo are involved in several application spaces:

Nucleic acid factories
Boston-based Ginkgo, which is backed by Bill Gates’s private investment firm Cascade Investment and hedge fund Viking Global, has worked on projects including helping optimize a piece of the manufacturing process of Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccine and making coronavirus tests.
....
Ginkgo’s manufacturing systems can produce the raw materials for such vaccines, including nucleic acids, which until now have never been produced at the scale needed to vaccinate billions of patients around the world.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health- ... NL1N2IA2C7

Super anti-biotics
The genome mining platform will “supplement Ginkgo's state of the art sequencing capabilities, extensive biological codebase, bioinformatics and machine learning tools for gene discovery and strain engineering expertise for active pharmaceutical ingredient production,” it adds. The move sees Warp Drive move away from antibiotics and focus predominately on cancer, a much more profitable area for the biotech, and its new owner.
...
Jason Kelly, CEO and co-founder of Ginkgo Bioworks, said: “Bringing Warp Drive Bio's deep expertise in genomics-based natural products discovery to Ginkgo's codebase is the key to unlocking new products, like novel antibiotics that can help combat the rise of antibiotic-resistant diseases. We are thrilled to welcome the Warp Drive genome mining team to Ginkgo to continue their important work and embark on this pivotal journey together.”

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/cro/ginkg ... roche-pact

Food production
In just a year, Ginkgo developed 6 prototype strains and produced product samples for benchmarking and early application testing. We then designed, built, and validated improved variants over the next 9 months. Within 2 years, Ginkgo developed commercial strains from scratch and developed fermentation and downstream purification processes that are now being used at kilogram-scale, with a projected 3 years time-to-market for the final product. The strain’s performance exceeded Motif’s specifications by >70%. We also identified a set of novel protein expression systems that exceed performance of best-in-class systems by 5-20 fold, thereby increasing productivity, reducing cost, and improving scalability over additional rounds of engineering.
https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/our-work ... e-of-food/

They seem to be doing this in partnership with an outfit that they spun off called "Motif Foods", but I'm not quite sure about the exact relationship there:
https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Artic ... based-meat

The firm have their fingers in other application spaces, biosecurity, agriculture, therapeutics. Not quite sure how to categorise them...a synbio consultancy perhaps?

More: I believe the firm is still privately owned? but is due to IPO very soon https://investmentu.com/ginkgo-bioworks-ipo-stock/. Perhaps people here who know more about IPOs will be able to decode some more about what that IPO document is saying. The CEO Jason Kelly is a co-founder (2008), can be found on twitter I believe, but I have not spent anymore time trying to figure out the authenticity of the whole outfit. Might be worth keeping an eye on.

Matt

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#433805

Postby GrahamPlatt » August 10th, 2021, 7:11 pm

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... sis-report

Rather obvious, but underlines the need for a move to the alternatives on offer from “synthetic” foods

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#433972

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » August 11th, 2021, 10:41 am

GrahamPlatt wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/10/global-food-supplies-will-suffer-as-temperatures-rise-climate-crisis-report

Rather obvious, but underlines the need for a move to the alternatives on offer from “synthetic” foods

Did you read that link about their IPO? Can you figure out when they are publicly tradeable?

EDIT: In other words, although *I think* that the SPAC have acquired it for now, but do we assume that they will float it, soon, when they think it's right time? Apologies but I've not had the expertise in this game yet to understand exactly how IPOs work.

Matt

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#434019

Postby GrahamPlatt » August 11th, 2021, 12:09 pm

Well, the very last paragraph implies that the IPO is imminent

“When will Ginkgo Bioworks IPO? The board of directors for Soaring Eagle and Ginkgo Bioworks approved the transaction. Now it needs approval from the stockholders. If everything goes well, investors can expect Ginkgo Bioworks stock in the third quarter of 2021.”

But as to whether you can be forewarned as to exactly when, or get invited to bid for the shares at IPO (as one can via PrimaryBid.com for the LSE), I don’t know of a route to that on the US exchanges.

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#434034

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » August 11th, 2021, 12:46 pm

GrahamPlatt wrote:Well, the very last paragraph implies that the IPO is imminent

“When will Ginkgo Bioworks IPO? The board of directors for Soaring Eagle and Ginkgo Bioworks approved the transaction. Now it needs approval from the stockholders. If everything goes well, investors can expect Ginkgo Bioworks stock in the third quarter of 2021.”

But as to whether you can be forewarned as to exactly when, or get invited to bid for the shares at IPO (as one can via PrimaryBid.com for the LSE), I don’t know of a route to that on the US exchanges.

Yes it be not be available to UK peeps for a while after. Hopefully the initial price craziness will be settled down a little by then. I looked at the "careers" option on their website, and they are certainly gearing themselves up for big expansion. Just joined twitter in order to follow their CEO!

Matt

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#434388

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » August 12th, 2021, 4:40 pm

BOSTON and NEW YORK, Aug. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Ginkgo Bioworks ("Ginkgo") and Soaring Eagle Acquisition Corp. (Nasdaq: SRNG) ("Soaring Eagle") announced today that the Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") has declared effective the Registration Statement on Form S-4 filed by Soaring Eagle with the SEC relating to the previously announced business combination between Ginkgo and Soaring Eagle (the "Business Combination").

"This is an important milestone in our path towards becoming a publicly traded company," commented Jason Kelly, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ginkgo. "I want to take a moment to thank our incredible team for their hard work to get us to this point and our investors for their support over many years as we work to make biology easier to engineer. We look forward to closing the Business Combination and continuing to partner with the team at Soaring Eagle in this next chapter."

Ginkgo and Soaring Eagle expect to close the transaction in the third quarter, at which point Ginkgo's Class A common stock will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "DNA". The Business Combination is expected to provide up to $2.5 billion of gross cash proceeds, including Soaring Eagle's $1.725 billion of cash in trust (subject to any redemptions by Soaring Eagle shareholders) and $775 million in gross proceeds from a PIPE transaction priced at $10.00 per share of Class A common stock of Soaring Eagle to be funded immediately prior to the closing of the transaction.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-release ... 53636.html

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Re: Ginkgo Bioworks www.ginkgobioworks.com

#439264

Postby TheMotorcycleBoy » September 2nd, 2021, 3:36 pm

Hi folks,

I spent a bit more time looking at Ginkgo bioworks. Initially I slogged my way through their H1 Update presentation. Here's a link to it on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IE5NM1f1t4 On the surface the slides and numbers looked impressive, but.....

There is something about them that is giving me the creeps. Considering that their SPAC (soaring eagle) vehicle has mark cap of about $15B and they are about to list publicly as NYSE:DNA, I don't think that they present themselves very maturely.

The CEO (Jason Kelly) seems to do much more hand waving than making interesting comments, in the first part. In the second part (the Q&A) he seems to get a little unhinged and drop in two uses of the F-word (the first at 39:48). Is this cool for a guy who's supposedly to spearheading a $15B organisation to say publicly? In addition, he seems to indulge in an almost embarrassingly amount of head scratching, hair tussling, general fidgeting whilst giving somewhat unclear answers to straightforward questions.

Additionally I researched the SVP

https://www.montgomerysummit.com/speake ... ie-wagner/
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/fash ... nnott.html

she's from PE not Biotech, and her hubby is a hedge fund manager. They seem more to be *probably* more interested in a high valuation for their stock than science.

Listen in to the details of the financial HY update, they are talking about $175M forecast revenue. Assuming the $15B mark cap remains on listing that gives us 85x sales valuation. Hmmm.... I knew that it would be steep, but as a comparision I'm guessing that MRNA is about 25x sales right now.

Additionally, I believe that the "revenue" figures they are using are amassed from including several internal spin-outs, e.g. Motif, so it's as if they are buying from themselves. :shock:

Circular revenue
All of biology is being pushed forward by the ability to read DNA, write it, and use those instructions to program organisms or human cells. By automating the use of these technologies, Ginkgo’s backers believe, the company is uniquely positioned to take a commanding position. Harry Sloan, a lawyer and Hollywood executive, is one of the business figures behind Soaring Eagle and previously took the fantasy sports betting company DraftKings public. “These are companies that are not only leaders in their field but actually created the field themselves,” he told the Globe. “That is certainly the case with Ginkgo and synthetic biology.”

In its presentations to investors, Sloan’s group predicts that within four years Ginkgo’s app-store model will have five hundred clients and generate billions of dollars in cash flow. Ginkgo frequently issues press releases announcing new customers, suggesting a growing clamor for its scientific resources. However, many of its customers are not fully independent from Ginkgo. According to Ginkgo’s financial documents, more than half its foundry’s 2020 revenues came from a few “related” companies that it partly owns.

One way Ginkgo creates demand for its services is to form spinout ventures, which then become the customers of its foundries. These deals have sometimes been financed by Ginkgo’s own largest investors, which include the hedge fund Viking Global and Cascade Investments, Bill Gates’s investment firm. Besides Motif FoodWorks, which operates in the same building, Gingko created Allonnia, a company developing microbes to break down pollution, which also subscribes to its foundry services.

Another example of how Ginkgo has financed demand for its services was a collaboration it announced in June 2019: a ”transformational” project with a startup called Synlogic, which is engineering E. coli bacteria to treat serious metabolic disorders. In ongoing studies, patients are swallowing pills filled with germs that have been programmed to carry out helpful functions, like digesting certain excess amino acids, the cause of a disease called phenylketonuria. The deal was important because it signaled that Ginkgo could get involved in potentially profitable new drugs, not only industrial ingredients.

But the way the deal was structured, it was Ginkgo that ended up paying for most of the R&D, not Synlogic. As part of the agreement, Synlogic did cut a check for $30 million in cash to Ginkgo for foundry services aimed at improving its strains. But Ginkgo simultaneously invested $80 million in Synlogic at a sizable premium to its stock price at the time. In effect, the money took a round trip, starting as cash in Ginkgo’s bank account and ending up as payment for foundry services.


from https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/0 ... 5-billion/

But what sticks in my mind most, is Jason's liberal usage of the F-word in public presentation to potential future investors. I mean I can swear with the best of them, but would I at this kind of talk? Probably not. Or am I being a bit of a prude here?

Matt


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