Aptamer warns on full-year revenue as headwinds continue into 2023

(Alliance News) - Aptamer Group PLC on Tuesday warned it will miss its full-year revenue target, as headwinds continued into the new financial year.

Aptamer is a York, England-based provider of custom services, diagnostics and therapeutics for biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms.

The company said that in the six months that ended December 31, it faced challenging economic conditions but also made significant progress with its investment in new facilities to create more capacity and an expanded team.

Aptamer added that it expects revenue to be second-half weighted, owing to typical seasonality of customer budgets, but this has been exacerbated this year, due to a number of factors including customer delays and general economic conditions.

Therefore, Aptamer expects revenue in the first half to be in the region on GBP1.0 million. This would be down 29% from GBP1.4 million a before.

Looking ahead, the company said it remains focused on delivering market expectations for the full year but acknowledges that the headwinds experienced in the first half may continue into 2023 and that revenue for the full year may fall below market expectations, but materially ahead of the level achieved last financial year.

It added that it has "good visibility" on its commercial pipeline going into the second half, including a further GBP1.0 million of current signed orders, as well as contracts in negotiation and strong expressions of interest across all three business units.

In the year to June 30, 2022, Aptamer reported revenue of GBP4.0 million and a pretax loss of GBP2.6 million.

Aptamer said it will provide further updates as it progresses through the second half of its financial year.

Chief Executive Officer Arron Tolley said: "Our highly active deal pipeline demonstrates the clear market opportunity and demand for Optimers across the life sciences industry. In the current challenging economic environment, by offering our customers significant cost savings as they develop therapies and diagnostic products and conduct research activities, we expect to generate increasing revenue through paid R&D activities, IP licensing deals and success-based milestone payments.

Shares in Aptamer were down 3.9% to 50.00 pence each in London on Tuesday afternoon.

By Sophie Rose, Alliance News reporter

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