RaySearch – The Post-Covid turnaround

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Elevator pitch

  • Only independent software company in radiotherapy for cancer treatment with very strong product offering, never lost a customer.
  • Founder led company which spent more on software R&D than the current market cap of the company.
  • Although their product is good, a strong R&D push which reduced profits + previous aggressive accounting and now Covid-19 has hammered the stock from 260 to 45 SEK.
  • New CFO in place and CEO/CFO has promised focus on cost control (for the first time).
  • With a stronger software offering, hospitals are going back to business as usual, latest report confirmed early signs of turn-around.
  • RaySearch has 70% market share in proton therapy, which has a very strong outlook the coming ten years.
  • With very conservative estimates more than 60% upside and a weighted valuation pricing gives 85% upside.

Background

RaySearch is a Swedish medical technology company that develops software to improve cancer treatments. RaySearch software is today used by over 2,600 clinics in more than 65 countries. The company was founded in 2000 by Johan Löf as he was working on his PhD in radiation treatment. Johan is still the majority shareholder and CEO and has proudly stated that RaySearch has never lost a customer, that’s a pretty strong statement.

In the early days RaySearch delivered functionality to the leading treatment system vendor Philips. In 2003 RaySearch listed on the Stockholm exchange. RaySearch is developing highly complicated software in a very specialized field. The cancer treatment facilities are among the most complex areas in a hospital and requires both very advanced machines and software. Radiotherapy kills the cancer cells by various kind of high energy beams, like x-ray or protons. The core of RaySearch products and what Johan worked on already in his PhD is a more clever dosing of the dangerous radiotherapy. Basically “burn” away the cancer with higher precision, meaning minimizing damage to healthy tissue. After the early cooperation with Philips, RaySearch tied more and more partners to its development. Companies like IBA Dosimetry and Varian as well as certain large University hospitals worked together with RaySearch. Over the past two decades RaySearch grew from a small niche player with some smart algorithms into the only major stand-alone software company in this field. All this was done without any share dilution, RaySearch has funded all growth by being profitable from a very early stage. This R&D has coincidentally costed RaySearch just in line with the current Market Cap of the company (1.55bn SEK). Let’s look at the history and the products RaySearch developed in greater detail (press read more).

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