It's incredible to see the number of providers that claim to be a CDMO. Walking the aisles of CPhI last year and talking to people during DCAT week mid-March, I see the industry in a similar hype
like in the early 2000's, when the buzzword "one-stop-shop" was on. I think, not everybody who claims to be a CDMO really knows how this kind of business works. Some want to become bigger and
bigger thinking that size matters. Many of the competitors behave in an opportunistic way wanting to jump on the bandwagon. The reality looks somewhat different, what we see is a kind of an
"ecosystem" of providers, small ones, medium sized ones, large ones, specialists, the large ones often with a large portfolio of technologies. The geopolitical landscape makes European providers
again more interesting, Indian CDMO's could (partially) take the role of Chinese providers. The USA are trying to "re-shore", but do we really believe that making that low value, high volume
products should or can be reshored? If not using new technologies that could make these processes competitive? The Western Pharma industry has completely neglected the research and development of
new antibiotics, while we need them for resistant strains and while we face shortages of the most common antibiotics such as Amoxicillin to name only one (example: in Switzerland, we have a list
of approx. 600 items actually in shortage, some Big Pharma decided to supply only now and then some batches of for example Temazepam to Switzerland, which also causes shortages).
Hype
yes or not, a real CDMO needs to do its job right: understand your customer, anticipate problems with your solutions, play open books on cost, if you have a problem, talk to your customer, try to
understand the clinical development logics of your customer even if you are "only" an intermediate or API supplier etc.
And
if you make a Business Plan, how do you want to plan sales if you do not (yet) have a decent portfolio of projects? Simple, you cannot plan exactly. We have seen a number of such plans failing
and especially larger groups restructuring and downsizing.
These
are a few thoughts (by the way, I did not use AI, all comes from my own grey cells and experience).
Curious
about your comments and views.
Roger
cdmolive
Also posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7188215325463568384/
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