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Transnational Thursday for May 29, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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No, the revenue was higher - around $40bn. Moderna also got a lot of public money for vaccine project. I am not sure what cash has to do with it. Profit and cash are completely different things - you can make a profit on X and then invest it in Y and have no cash at all or negative cash flow. In fact, a lot of R&D-heavy companies operate in exactly that manner. Or you could just distribute all the profits as dividends and have no cash on hand at all. I am not saying these things aren't related at all - if you have a lot of profits, you'd usually have some cash, but there's no direct relation between how much the company makes in profits on specific project and how much it has on hand in cash at any given moment.

As for market cap, it used to have 180bn market cap in 2021 at its peak. I'm sure there were some events happening in 2021 that are much less happening now that could explain that, but I am having hard time remembering what could it be...

I admit some of these figures may be inaccurate, there aren't official number of how much profit they made specifically from COVID, so I had to assemble the information from pieces lying around, and make some assumptions (like about what exactly generated their profits in 2020-2021 and doesn't in 2025 anymore) but I am pretty sure even if I was wrong it's not by an order of magnitude. So the original point still stands - they have enough money to do what they want to do. Of course, if they can get money of my pocket for free (with the taxman serving as the delivery boy) and then pocket all the profit, it's much more lucrative. But I don't see how comes I owe them that.