All fierce debates may end up in nothing if weighty arguments are not proven by plain statistics. Remarkably, German start-up BioNTech may become the key catalyst for Germany’s economic growth. The company got a name for its contribution to the development of the highly effective COVID-19 vaccine.
BioNTech can boost the national output in Europe’s largest economy by 0.5% percentage points this year, Sebastian Dullien, head of Düsseldorf-based Macroeconomic Policy Institute (IMK), shared his estimates. “I can’t think of another example in which a single company had such an impact on German GDP,” the macroeconomist told Reuters. “Sometimes, however, there are rare cases in which individual companies have macroeconomic relevance. BioNTech is such a rare example,” he added. In other words, if Germany’s economy expands roughly by 4% in 2021, it means that BioNTech alone could account for almost one eighth of its overall GDP growth this year.
"BioNTech could play a similar role in the pharmaceutical industry as Tesla or Apple in their industries," Berenberg Capital Markets analyst Zhiqiang Shu is on the same page with the macroeconomist.
Importantly, biotechnology firm BioNTech and American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are two different companies. BioNTech entered the research at the stage of clinical trials when the vaccine had already been developed. The world’s first COVID-19 vaccine known as a Pfizer vaccine is sold under the brand name of Comirnaty.
At present, BioNTech is unwilling to work in the shadow of its renowned partner. A great ship asks big waters, the proverb says. So, being a publicly traded company, BioNTech’s market capitalization zoomed up to $100 billion in August 2021 amid a rapid rally of its shares. Once a modest start-up, BioNTech has evolved into one of the most valuable companies in Germany.
