I understand the 'blackbox' feeling as it is in biotech. I doubt the institutions, let alone the army of mum and dad investors truly understand everything CSL does, the differences in each treatment, the difference in the health systems in each country they sell into, the quality of the R&D pipeline or whatever risk is being worked on by the competition (synthetic blood etc).

The financials are pretty straight forward to understand though and to me it looks relatively attractive.

Yes. Good point about nobody really fully understanding it. The tricky thing for me when researching a company like this is most of what’s talked about from the company and analysts is the recent marginal changes to earnings. Starting from near scratch, it took me a while just to understand what they broadly do and how they collect and spend money. Even in the plasma collection business, there’s all these collaborations that go on to simply collect the input (ie the blood), which in Australia for example they largely do through the Red Cross, and then turn it into a marketable product which they sell through what seems like an account management approach via hospitals at a solid margin. Beyond their scale, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what their moat is.

The long term financials certainly paint a glowing picture but I don’t want to invest on that alone. I think this is broadly understood by the market and feel I need to dig deeper. I think I get the major division enough though to feel ok about a small investment. A work in progress.