Covering WuXi AppTec, WuXi Biologics, WuXi XDC, Pharmaron, Asymchem and Porton — China’s CXDMO leaders — plus Samsung Biologics, Lonza and the global CDMO frontier: results, capacity, M&A and partnerships.
8Companies Tracked
101Stories
5Segments · WuXi / Domestic / Global / Insight / New Drugs
Pharmaron's Q3 2026 report (published late October): third-quarter revenue of RMB 3.645B, up 13.4%, and net profit of RMB 440M, up 42.5% but slightly below consensus of RMB 467M. The more important signal sits in the order book: nine-month new-order growth of about 13%, accelerating from roughly 10% in the first half. UBS raised its H-share target price to HK$32.9 on the back of it, keeping Buy — a textbook recovery report in which orders lead and margins follow.
Xue Yingzhou, just appointed President of Jiuzhou Pharmaceutical, spent the first half of his career at Novartis rising to production director, supply-chain director and technical-service director; after Jiuzhou acquired Suzhou Novartis for about RMB 790M in 2019, he moved with the plant and ran its core subsidiary Ruibo Suzhou for seven years. Executive VP Cai Wanyu, appointed in the same batch, brings nearly 40 years of manufacturing management. The message is industry-wide: buying MNC assets in China is lesson one; internalising the acquirer's operating DNA is lesson two — the one that decides customer concentration and commercial-order execution.
9M total revenue RMB 45.54B and attributable net profit RMB 19.40B (+60.6%); adjusted non-IFRS net profit RMB 18.38B (+74.4%). Continuing-operations backlog crossed RMB 70B for the first time at RMB 76.74B, and the company raised full-year guidance again.
As the 2026 third-quarter reporting season closes, the four A-share CDMO leaders - WuXi AppTec, Porton, Asymchem and Pharmaron - show a sector back in growth but with divergence widening: top-line expansion returned to double digits, yet growth rates span +9% to +38.6%, and differences in earnings quality and business mix matter more than scale.
On 22 October the US Treasury published a notice of proposed rulemaking under the COINS Act that adds biotechnology as the sixth controlled technology sector — and the only one the Treasury added on its own authority. Drug compounds, biomanufacturing equipment and facilities, biological design and sequencing, brain-computer interfaces, bioinformatics tools, flow cytometers and LC-MS systems would be prohibited. Conventional in-licensing agreements paid in cash without equity, and fee-for-service R&D collaborations, are explicitly carved out. Comments run to 7 December; a final rule is targeted before 13 March 2027.
On 22 October Gilead agreed to pay USD 1.275 billion in cash upfront (about RMB 8.5 billion) for Shanghai-based PepStar Therapeutics' oral IL-23R inhibitor programme, whose lead asset HCXT-2001 is still in Phase 1. The seller was founded in April 2023 and moved a molecule to a billion-dollar upfront in just over three years. The valuation is only part of the story: if oral macrocyclic peptides work, they open a second volume curve for peptide CDMOs beyond GLP-1.
On 20 October OpenAI announced the acquisition of Orchestra Bio, a drug development coordination platform whose team and technology will join Rosalind, its life sciences unit. Unlike earlier AI-pharma deals focused on targets and molecule design, Orchestra's agents track programme schedules, trace cross-stage delays and compare response options. As AI moves from design into execution, what gets digitised is CMC, manufacturing batches and supply chains - the most data-dense part of the CXDMO value chain.
Hansoh Pharma announced a platform-level ADC partnership with Roche on 19 October: USD 400M upfront, USD 110M on the one-year anniversary and more than USD 15B in potential milestones, a total exceeding USD 15.5B and the second-largest China out-licensing deal on record. The subject is no longer a single molecule but two preclinical programmes plus multiple Roche-proposed targets developed on Hansoh's own ADC platform. In the same window, METiS partnered with Lilly on an AI-driven extrahepatic LNP platform and Hutchmed closed a USD 110M upfront, while the NDRC reported roughly USD 130B of innovation-drug technology licensing in the first nine months.
ESMO 2026 runs 23-27 October in Madrid with roughly 30 Chinese studies among the late-breaking abstracts - about one third of the total and a record high. China holds five of the twelve Presidential Symposium slots, all Phase III: HutchMed's SAFFRON and Akeso's HARMONi-GI1 both hit PFS and OS, Hansoh's B7-H3 ADC ARTEMIS-011 delivered the first positive Phase III in osteosarcoma in a decade, Kelun-Biotech's TROP2 ADC TroFuse-005 met dual primary endpoints, while KeyMed/Lepu's CLDN18.2 ADC met OS but missed PFS.
On October 13, Zydus Lifesciences and Formycon announced FDA acceptance of the FYB206 BLA — a pembrolizumab (Keytruda) biosimilar and, to the companies' knowledge, the first publicly announced Keytruda biosimilar filing accepted in the US. Developed without a comparative Phase III efficacy trial under a February 2025 FDA agreement, FYB206 could see a decision by Q3 2027. Keytruda posted US$8.4B in Q2 2026 quarterly sales, putting the industry's largest patent cliff on the clock.