Artisan Partners, a high value-added investment management firm, published its ‘Artisan Small Cap Fund’ fourth quarter 2021 investor letter – a copy of which can be downloaded here. A return of -6.99% was recorded by its Investor Class: ARTSX, -6.93% by its Advisor Class: APDSX, and -6.93% by its Institutional Class: APHSX for the fourth quarter of 2021, all below the Russell 2000® Growth Index that delivered a 0.01% return and the Russell 2000® Index that was up by 2.14% for the same period. Spare some time to check the fund’s top 5 holdings to have a clue about their top bets for 2022.
Artisan Small Cap Fund, in its Q4 2021 investor letter, mentioned Avid Bioservices, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDMO) and discussed its stance on the firm. Avid Bioservices, Inc. is a Tustin, California-based pharmaceutical company with a $1.1 billion market capitalization. CDMO delivered a -35.61% return since the beginning of the year, while its 12-month returns are up by 1.02%. The stock closed at $18.79 per share on February 23, 2022.
Here is what Artisan Small Cap Fund has to say about Avid Bioservices, Inc. in its Q4 2021 investor letter:
“Avid Bioservices is a pure-play contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) in biologic production. Avid was a biotech company until 2018 when it refocused its strategy to become a pureplay CDMO. Drug development is complex, and CDMOs such as Avid allow pharmaceutical and biotech companies to outsource their drug development and manufacturing needs. This provides several benefits, including reducing or eliminating infrastructure costs, providing access to additional expertise and enabling pharma and biotech companies to rapidly scale. Avid’s specialization in biologics is a particularly important part of our profit cycle thesis. Biologics are the fastest growing segment of drugs in development, which, along with accelerated demand for COVID-19 related treatments, has created what we view as a sustainable supplydemand imbalance for at least the next few years. The company is working to expand its biologics manufacturing capacity (with some coming online in 2022) which could drive meaningful top-line growth over the next several years. We also note Halozyme is its largest customer (~50% of sales)—a company and management team we have become deeply familiar with over the course of our multi-year investment campaign—who helped us validate the quality of this franchise before we initiated our GardenSM position in Q4.”
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Our calculations show that Avid Bioservices, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDMO) failed to obtain a mark on our list of the 30 Most Popular Stocks Among Hedge Funds. CDMO was in 14 hedge fund portfolios at the end of the fourth quarter of 2021, compared to 21 funds in the previous quarter. Avid Bioservices, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDMO) delivered a -40.48% return in the past 3 months.
In July 2021, we also shared another hedge fund’s views on CDMO in another article. You can find other letters from hedge funds and prominent investors on our hedge fund investor letters 2021 Q4 page.
Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
