(Yicai Global) March 17 -- Shares of Nanjing Vazyme Biotech surged as much as 8.4 percent today after the Chinese biotech firm said it had secured an order for CNY215 million (USD34 million) worth of its home-use Covid-19 test kits as China opens up the market to antigen tests.

Vazyme’s share price [SHA:688105] was trading up 2.41 percent at CNY102 (USD16) as of 11:30 a.m. China time. Earlier in the day it had reached CNY107.99.

Purchaser Shanghai Medical Instruments will receive the order between March 14 and June 30, the Nanjing, eastern Jiangsu province-based company said yesterday. The value of the contract is more than 50 percent of Vazyme’s operating costs in the last fiscal year, it added.

China has only just started to allow the sale of home-use antigen test kits as the country grapples with a new wave of the disease. Previously it had only authorized nucleic acid tests that need to be performed by trained professionals. Ten Covid-19 antigen self-testing kits have been approved by regulators since March 12, and six of these are available for pre-orders. Vazyme’s is the cheapest of these at CNY24.30 (USD3.83) each.

Despite this, antigen test kit makers were still able to sell their products abroad. Covid-19 detection sets accounted for 61 percent of Vazyme’s revenue last year at CNY1.1 billion (USD173.4 million), according to the firm’s 2021 preliminary financial report released last month. Revenue was 3 percent lower than the year before due to a drop in prices.

China reported another 1,226 locally transmitted confirmed cases and 1,206 asymptomatic infections yesterday, the National Health Commission said today. Between March 1 and March 14, there were more than 15,000 cases across 28 provincial-level regions, it said yesterday.

Editor: Kim Taylor