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AVIR, Atea Pharmaceuticals Inc.
We are a late-stage clinical biopharmaceutical company leveraging our deep understanding of antiviral drug development, medicinal chemistry, biochemistry and virology to discover, develop and commercialize novel, orally administered antivirals to treat serious viral diseases.
Pending successful results from these Phase 3 clinical trials, we are targeting submission to US Food and Drug Administration ("FDA") of a New Drug Application ("NDA") for marketing approval in March 2027.
In 2025, global net sales of branded HCV therapeutics 1 known in the US as Epclusa (including the authorized generic copy of Epclusa) and Mavyret exceeded $2.5 billion with the US accounting for approximately 50% of these sales.
The business
What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.
The business in brief
read the 10-K →What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.
- Situation
- Unprofitable. No sustained operating profit across the record; an earnings multiple has nothing to rest on. What the record does show is revenue, the gross-margin trajectory, and the burn against the cash on hand. Net current asset value. Current assets alone exceed every liability combined, and the surplus is most of the balance sheet: the shape Graham called a net-net.
- What moves the needle
- The pipeline against the patent cliff, and pricing. What decides it: whether new drugs replace those losing exclusivity, the odds in the clinical pipeline, and how durable pricing stays against payers and generics. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on pricing power & competition, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.
The record
Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.
Net income is the accountant's number; owner earnings is the cash an owner could take out. The walk between them, off the cash-flow statement, and whether the gap is widening or holding.
In fiscal 2021 the business reported $121M of profit but ($87M) of owner earnings: $208M less than the profit line, taken out by capital spending and the timing of cash.
| FY2021 | FY2020 | |
|---|---|---|
| Reported net income | $121M | ($11M) |
| Depreciation & amortizationnon-cash charge added back | +$29K | +$19K |
| Stock-based compensationreal costnon-cash, but a real cost | +$40M | +$7M |
| Working capital & othertiming of cash in and out, other non-cash items | −$248M | +$300M |
| Cash from operations | ($87M) | $297M |
| Maintenance capital expenditurethe spending needed just to hold position and volume | −$4K | −$19K |
| Owner earnings | ($87M) | $297M |
| Growth capital expenditurediscretionary; spent to get bigger, not to stand still | — | −$7K |
| Free cash flow | ($87M) | $297M |
| Owner-earnings marginowner earnings ÷ revenue | -25% | 610% |
Owner earnings is the cash an owner could pull out without starving the business: operating cash less the capital it must spend to hold its position . The cash-flow statement also adds stock comp back as non-cash, but it is a real cost paid in shares; counted as the expense it is (less $40M), owner earnings is nearer ($127M).
Much of fiscal 2021's profit didn't arrive as operating cash; it sits in “working capital & other” above. That can be a real inventory or timing swing, or profit that doesn't run through operating cash at all: a heavy tax year, equity-method earnings, or investment income booked through investing. For a year like this, owner earnings understates the cash earned; the full cash-flow statement carries the rest.
Maintenance capex is estimated as depreciation where a growing business invests above it; free cash flow is the figure the scorecard's free-cash margin reads.
Quality & stewardship
Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.
Owner’s Scorecard
Will it survive?
- No meaningful interest burdenLittle or no interest expense reported
What this means
Little or no interest expense reported, the business isn't leaning on lenders to operate.
- Net cash, debt-freeCash $96M − debt $0
What this means
Cash and short-term investments exceed every dollar of debt by $96M, on net the company owes nothing, and can act from strength when others can't. Net debt is the leverage figure that matters: the cash is already set against the debt. Strategic or illiquid investments aren't counted here.
- Not enough data
What this means
The filing data didn't include the inputs for this check.
Is it a good business?
- Not enough dataIndustry peers: median -82%
What this means
The filing data didn't include the inputs for this check.
- Consumes cashOwner earnings ($132M) = operating cash ($132M) − maintenance capex $416KIndustry peers: median -48%
What this means
What an owner could take out without starving the business: operating cash less the maintenance capital it must spend to hold its position — Buffett's owner earnings. That's -38% of revenue this year. Treating stock comp as the real expense it is (less $21M of SBC) leaves ($153M).
- Are earnings backed by cash? ($132M)Loss, and burning cashNet income ($158M) · cash from operations ($132M)
What this means
The company reported a net loss, so a conversion ratio isn't meaningful. What matters then is whether operations still threw off cash, here, they did not.
How is the cash used?
- No surplus to allocate
What this means
The business didn't generate positive Owner Earnings this year, so any distributions came from the balance sheet or borrowing, not from operations.
- Investing or harvesting? 4.67×ExpandingCapex $2M ÷ depreciation $416K
What this means
Descriptive, not a grade. Above ~1× means investing faster than assets wear out (growth, or, sustained for years, today's earnings carrying less depreciation than tomorrow's will). Below means spending less than it's wearing out (efficiency, or a melting asset base). The ratio won't tell you which; the filings will.
Graham’s defensive tests · 1 of 2 met
Graham’s numerical criteria for the defensive investor (The Intelligent Investor, ch. 14), run on the filings. A floor of safety, not a buy signal; many fine modern businesses fail his strictest liquidity rules by design.
- Adequate size MissRevenue ≥ $2B · $351M
What this means
Big enough to weather a storm. Graham's 1972 floor was ~$100M of sales (≈ $700M today); we use a $2B revenue line as a conservative modern stand-in.
- Strong liquidity PassCurrent ratio ≥ 2× · 7.82×
What this means
Current assets at least twice current liabilities, near-term bills covered without touching the business. Strict by design: many cash-rich modern firms run leaner and miss it, holding their cushion in longer-dated securities.
- Moderate price —P/E ≤ 15 and P/E × P/B ≤ 22.5 · decided by the price
What this means
Graham's valuation gate, the wall he kept between a sound business and a sound investment. Three-year average earnings are $0.69/share (latest year $-1.98), the averaged base the calculator's gate runs on, and book value is $3.44/share. Enter a price in “What the price implies” just below for the P/E, P/B, and whether it clears. But this is the rule Buffett outgrew: there's no hard P/E law, and a wonderful business can deserve a far richer multiple if the thesis holds, treat it as the bargain-hunter's floor, not a verdict on the price.
Does AI threaten the moat?
Low contestabilityThe moat is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded, the kind AI cuts costs within but does not contest.
Its FY2025 10-K names artificial intelligence as a competitive threat, in language that was not in the prior year's filing.
“It is possible that new laws and regulations will be adopted in the US and in other non-US jurisdictions, or that existing laws and regulations, including competition and antitrust laws, may be interpreted in ways that would limit our ability to use AI for our business.”
AI is unlikely to contest a moat that is physical, regulated or balance-sheet-funded; here it reads more as a cost tool than a threat.
Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.
All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.
Current Position
as of the latest quarter, Mar 31, 2026Can the business pay what it owes this year, off the freshest balance sheet: the quality of the assets, the debt actually coming due, and what a low ratio means here.
- Cash & short-term investments$79M
- Receivables$5M
- Other current assets$179M
- Accounts payable$9M
- Other current liabilities$24M
From the company's latest filing.
Management, ownership & pay
read the proxy →From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.
| Fiscal year | Chief executive | Pay, as filed | “Actually paid” | Net income |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Jean-Pierre Sommadossi | $34.1M | −$1.5M | $121M |
| 2022 | Jean-Pierre Sommadossi | $5.9M | $705k | — |
| 2023 | Jean-Pierre Sommadossi | $5.9M | $3.4M | — |
| 2024 | Jean-Pierre Sommadossi | $4.2M | $4.3M | — |
| 2025 | Jean-Pierre Sommadossi | $3.4M | $3.6M | — |
Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Net income is the whole business's, as filed, for the same fiscal years.
- Stock-based compensation$21M
The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 6% of revenue. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.
What an owner would ask, FY2025
read the 10-K →- Which reported numbers are a judgment call?Management names Revenue recognition, Stock compensation as critical estimates
each rests partly on management's judgment; the filing's note sets out the assumptionsverify →
The questions the record and the charts do not answer on their own; each carries the figure and the place to look.
Peers, Pharmaceuticals
The same industry, side by side on owner economics. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.
| Company | Revenue | Gross margin | Op. margin | ROIC | Owner earn. margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INVAInnoviva Inc. | $411M | — | 85.6% | 44% | 63% |
| ARDXArdelyx Inc. | $407M | 87% | -138.7% | -82% | -232% |
| ESPREsperion Therapeutics Inc. | $403M | — | -62.8% | — | -48% |
| ARQTArcutis Biotherapeutics Inc. | $376M | 90% | -234.9% | -56% | -236% |
| AVIRAtea Pharmaceuticals Inc. | $351M | — | -51.5% | -80% | -38% |
| MNKDMannKind Corporation | $349M | 72% | -63.3% | — | -45% |
| CRMDCorMedix Inc. | $312M | 8% | -8961.5% | -202% | -7330% |
| EOLSEvolus Inc. | $297M | 68% | -44.0% | -142% | -34% |
| Group median | — | — | -63.0% | -81% | -46% |
The price
What a price has to assume.
What the price implies
reverse-DCFType today's close and see the owner-earnings growth you'd have to believe to justify it, beside what Atea Pharmaceuticals Inc. has delivered.
Atea Pharmaceuticals Inc.’s latest year shows negative owner earnings, the mark of a build-out: total capital spending outruns the cash the business throws off today. So the tool opens on the steady-state base (maintenance capex in place of the build-out spend), the cash it would earn at rest; clear the toggle below to read the latest year exactly as reported.
—
9.0% = the 4.55% 10-year Treasury (Jul 15, 2026) + 4.45 points of equity premium. The rate you require is yours to set.
Enter a price above to run it.
A dated snapshot of the price you typed, the assumptions you set, and what the page showed for them. A snapshot is never edited after it is saved. Your notebook is yours alone — the commitment states what is stored and what we will never do.
Graham capped the multiple at 15×; Buffett and Munger let that rule go: a wonderful business can deserve 50× if the thesis holds. The gate marks the bargain-hunter's floor.
Prefilled with the 10-year Treasury (4.55%, as of Jul 15, 2026). Edit it for today’s exact figure, or a AAA corporate yield.
Graham measured a stock against the bond you could own instead, the heart of his margin of safety. Enter a price above to weigh the owner-earnings yield against this bond.
Free cash flow ($134M) on 80M shares outstanding, per the 10-Q cover, as of 2026-05-11; net cash $96M. The base opens on the steady-state figure (the latest year is negative on total capex mid-build-out); clear Steady-state to use the year as filed. Net of stock comp treats option pay as the expense it is. Capex ($2M) runs well above depreciation ($416K), so this is a build-out; Steady-state swaps total capex for maintenance (≈ depreciation), lifting the base to about ($132M), the cash it would throw off if it stopped expanding. The dials set the multiple a growth belief justifies; the price, and every dollar on this page, is yours.
Manual order: ← AVGO its page in the Manual AVNS →
Industry order: ← AUPH the Pharmaceuticals chapter AVTX →