[Special Stock] Seegene Surges on News of New Coronavirus Discovery in China

As of 9:31 AM on the 24th, the stock price of molecular diagnostics company Seegene is recorded at 25,400 KRW, up 7.4% from the previous trading day's closing price. This is due to news of a new coronavirus discovered in China.

Earlier, the Hong Kong South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on the 21st (local time) that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, announced the discovery of a new coronavirus (HKU5-CoV-2) in a paper published on the 18th in Cell, a globally authoritative journal in the life sciences. This virus can penetrate through the same human receptor as the virus that causes COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2), posing a risk of transmission from animals to humans.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology, to which the researchers who published the paper belong, was previously identified as the origin of the virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the researchers pointed out that “the discovered virus was not detected in humans but confirmed in the laboratory” and warned that “the risk of emergence in human populations should not be exaggerated.”

Seegene, a leading domestic molecular diagnostics company, experienced explosive growth in the past due to exports of COVID-19 diagnostic kits.

Seegene’s sales reached 1.1252 trillion KRW in 2020, when COVID-19 began to spread worldwide, nearly a tenfold increase compared to the previous year. It peaked at 1.3708 trillion KRW in 2021. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic subsided, sales sharply declined to 853.6 billion KRW in 2022 and 367.4 billion KRW in 2023.