The earnings report a company releases can be one of the biggest catalysts for stock gains around. That’s what happened to biotech stock ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN), as its recently-released earnings report showed off its quarter in grand style. Investors were only too happy to buy in even harder, sending shares up nearly 25% in Friday’s trading session.
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ImmunoGen pulled off a winner on almost every front. It brought in a loss of $0.16 per share as far as earnings went, but that loss wasn’t near as bad as expected; analysts looked for a $0.25 per share loss. No one wanted to estimate ImmunoGen’s revenue, however, which came in at $49.87 million. That was up 31% year-over-year.
The biggest drivers of ImmunoGen’s wins were sales of Elahere, its treatment targeting ovarian cancer, as well as a fee received from Vertex Pharma, who put in $15 million for a “multi-target license and option agreement” from the first quarter. ImmunoGen also revised its financial outlook and now expects total revenue of around $109.23 million. Better than half of that figure will come from sales of Elahere by itself. With more than double the current revenue in the offing, it’s small wonder investors flocked to ImmunoGen shares today.
Hedge funds, meanwhile, are squarely on ImmunoGen’s side. They may not have rushed to make purchases the way regular investors did today, but in the last quarter, they picked up an extra 140,600 shares. That wasn’t a big gain, as hedge funds already held over 41 million shares, but it was enough to tick hedge fund confidence to the high side of Neutral.
