While several CDMO giants have been weathering an industry slowdown in recent years following the pandemic and longing for better days, Almac Group is busy enjoying a growth spurt.
Over a busy year ending on Sept. 30, revenue at the U.K.-based manufacturer rose 14% from last year to 958 million pounds ($1.2 billion).
The revenue uptick comes during a major global expansion that was announced in 2021 to the tune of 400 million pounds ($508 million). Just this year, Almac wrapped up work on two new facilities in Craigavon, Northern Ireland. One of the plants makes and packages sachet drug products and the other will more than double the company’s peptide API manufacturing capacity.
So far, the expansion drive has created 1,800 new jobs, swelling Almac’s total headcount to more than 7,300.
During the financial year, the CDMO helped develop “hundreds of life-saving drugs spanning more than 20 therapeutic areas,” according to a release Tuesday.
Recent products Almac has helped supply include Agios’ rare blood disease therapy Pyrukynd, Sanofi’s diabetes injection Tzield and PTC’s brain-infused gene therapy Upstaza, to name a few.
Almac’s revenue growth is somewhat of an outlier in the wider CDMO landscape. Manufacturers such as Catalent, Lonza and AGC Biologics face sliding sales amid lagging funding compared to the pandemic boom.
AGC Biologics, for example, laid off just under 4% of its global workforce earlier this month due to “changing economies” and “other external factors” that led the Seattle-based CDMO to decide to “right size and rebalance the resources of our organization,” a spokesperson said at the time.
During a recent Evaluate webinar on the state of the manufacturing industry in 2024, CDMO sales lead for Pfizer CenterOne’s North America sector pointed out that much of the funding following a pandemic surge of venture capital interest in small- and mid-sized biotechs has dried up, leaving many CDMOs with fewer contracts.
Some, like Lonza, are looking on the bright side. The manufacturer recently flagged “initial signs” of an industry recovery for early-stage work. The Swiss company just inked a $1.2 billion deal to purchase a large biologics facility in California from Roche’s Genentech.