1 Life Science Stock to Watch in 2021 and Beyond

There are several life science stocks that are household names among the investing public, but Veeva Systems (VEEV 1.02%) isn't one of them. However, in this Fool Live video clip, recorded on June 3, Fool.com contributor Brian Withers discusses why this is one life science stock worth watching. 

Brian Withers: The stock that you may not have heard of that I'm covering today is Veeva Systems and I've got a few slides to go over, so I will share my screen and Veeva Systems services the as usual for me, it's a software company, software-as-a-service. They cover the life sciences industry and they started out by focused on that industry and have built a massive business and are now expanding beyond that.

But you'll be able to see that most of what they do is around life sciences. They are basically connecting industry with data, software and people. They have two major products; Veeva Commercial Cloud, here on the left is a CRM, customer relationship management suite, and you can see all the different tools there.

Part of the reason they started in commercial cloud, and the CRM tool is their system is built on the salesforce.com platform, as well as the Veeva Founder had worked at Salesforce and saw that there was a ton of regulations around the life sciences industry and that they needed a very specific solution for them. The other piece that they got into years later is called vault. The commercial cloud on the left is mainly for sales and marketing, and vault is mainly for research and development.

So kind of the product side, research and development, compliance, clinical, all the way from submitting your ideas, the FDA through manufacturing and support of the product. Think of the right is product centric things, anything related to product, and on the left is sales and marketing. Vault has grown faster and is now a bigger portion of their business, and this is one of the core slides. This is by year, and these are the number of vaults. They have different vaults. So if you go back, you can see the different vaults here, commercial, safety, rim, clinical, and the number of vaults over the years, as well as the number of vaults per customer.

Not only are they growing their customers, they're growing the number of products that their customers use. This is my favorite slides from Veeva. It shows you the longer that customers are in the system. You can see this first year 2013, 2014. Customers are spending almost 27 times more than they did their first year as they grow with the business. You can see this consistent trend, 2015 is nine times, 2016 is five times. The longer you're with the company, the more deeply embedded customers get with their products, and this is a fantastic land-and-expand model.

Part of the reason is you can see that they have products ranging. You might start up here with some of the commercial cloud products and then move into quality docs, registration, clinical debt down here MyVeeva around clinical. This service early adopters innovators to even late adopters, and so people, they have products across the spectrum as customers will gain confidence in their systems. The same on the commercial cloud. You can see the number of commercial cloud products is growing overtime per customer. This makes a strong history of revenue growth.

Not only do they have a strong history of revenue growth they are wildly profitable. You can see this non-GAAP operating income down at the bottom. But they are also generating GAAP profits as well. Now they are expanding their business into other regulated industries, CPD, cosmetics and chemicals, and you can see some of the early wins there. One of my favorite innovations for them is they're trying to digitize the clinical trials process. If you're familiar with that process at all, it is highly paper-intensive and highly inefficient, and so connecting clinical sites with sponsors and patients and making this all digital is a tremendous benefit to all parties involved and will accelerate clinical research.

You can see annual revenue here. They've been growing in the high 20s, 33% this past year and are projecting 24% growth in the coming year, and most of their revenue is subscriptions versus services where they help people install their products. They are trying to become a three billion dollar revenue run rate business by calendar year 2025 and are well on the way. They have significant opportunity to grow with the industry and the new industries that they're approaching. They have tremendous expansion with customers. They have an innovation engine and just massive market. If you haven't heard of Veeva Systems, it's worth putting on your watch list and checking out.