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There's no doubt that money can be made by owning shares of unprofitable businesses. For example, although software-as-a-service business Salesforce.com lost money for years while it grew recurring revenue, if you held shares since 2005, you'd have done very well indeed. But while history lauds those rare successes, those that fail are often forgotten; who remembers Pets.com?
So, the natural question for Curis (NASDAQ:CRIS) shareholders is whether they should be concerned by its rate of cash burn. For the purposes of this article, cash burn is the annual rate at which an unprofitable company spends cash to fund its growth; its negative free cash flow. The first step is to compare its cash burn with its cash reserves, to give us its 'cash runway'.
Check out our latest analysis for Curis
Does Curis Have A Long Cash Runway?
A company's cash runway is calculated by dividing its cash hoard by its cash burn. In June 2019, Curis had US$35m in cash, and was debt-free. Looking at the last year, the company burnt through US$26m. So it had a cash runway of approximately 16 months from June 2019. That's not too bad, but it's fair to say the end of the cash runway is in sight, unless cash burn reduces drastically. Depicted below, you can see how its cash holdings have changed over time.
How Well Is Curis Growing?
We reckon the fact that Curis managed to shrink its cash burn by 37% over the last year is rather encouraging. But the revenue dip of 7.0% in the same period was a bit concerning. On balance, we'd say the company is improving over time. Of course, we've only taken a quick look at the stock's growth metrics, here. This graph of historic earnings and revenue shows how Curis is building its business over time.
Can Curis Raise More Cash Easily?
Curis seems to be in a fairly good position, in terms of cash burn, but we still think it's worthwhile considering how easily it could raise more money if it wanted to. Companies can raise capital through either debt or equity. One of the main advantages held by publicly listed companies is that they can sell shares to investors to raise cash to fund growth. We can compare a company's cash burn to its market capitalisation to get a sense for how many new shares a company would have to issue to fund one year's operations.
Curis's cash burn of US$26m is about 32% of its US$81m market capitalisation. That's fairly notable cash burn, so if the company had to sell shares to cover the cost of another year's operations, shareholders would suffer some costly dilution.