Biopharma leaders told McKinsey they will buy more outsourced manufacturing at higher prices

The survey's own list of decision drivers describes buyers who still care about price. McKinsey named pressure to improve operational performance and productivity, rising cost sensitivity among customers, and what it called "surprisingly thin" loyalty to CDMOs ^[11]. "This suggests that many CDMOs are failing to bridge the gap from physical capacity and baseline execution to the productivity needed for competitive pricing," McKinsey wrote ^[12].

McKinsey said that access to readily available, regulatory-compliant capacity traditionally drove CDMO growth. Customers now emphasize reliability, execution and cost competitiveness, the firm said, with quality treated as a baseline requirement instead of a differentiator ^[7]. Quality problems are expensive. They can account for 15 to 20 percent of cost of goods sold, and a remediation plan runs $10 million to $50 million ^[8][10]. FDA Form 483 violation reports were up 33 percent last year against pre-COVID levels ^[9]. That figure counts reports. Without the number of inspections that produced them, it cannot separate more findings per inspection from more inspections.

GEN's top ten, ranked by 2025 revenue as disclosed in filings or in answers to GEN's queries, took a combined $35.116 billion, up six percent from $33.127 billion, with eight of the ten growing ^[16][14][15]. Global Market Insights put the whole market at $173.7 billion in 2025 and projects $184.9 billion this year, a 6.4 percent rise, and $342 billion by 2035 at a 7.1 percent compound rate ^[5][6]. So the ten largest suppliers hold roughly a fifth of the market ^[1]. Their 2025 growth of six percent sits a little below the 6.4 percent projected for the market this year, across different periods ^[3].

Growth sits below the top of the list. Lonza, ranked first, reported CHF 6.531 billion for 2025 against CHF 6.574 billion in 2024, a decline of about 0.7 percent in francs ^[20][2]. At No. 11, Merck KGaA's CDMO revenue fell 8.7 percent to 659 million euros from 722 million. The company is adding plant: a 300 million euro bioprocessing production center in Daejeon, South Korea, due to open by year's end, and a 25 million euro BioReliance testing facility in Darmstadt that opened in July ^[18][19]. Catalent left the list altogether, having stopped reporting revenues publicly after Novo Holdings completed its $16.5 billion acquisition on December 18, 2024 ^[17].

Imen Jelassi, founder and chief executive of the consultancy Corstrate, points to reshoring by Western biopharmas under the BIOSECURE Act as a potential opening for U.S. and European CDMOs ^[13].

What executives expect to do and what they later buy are two different measurements, and this survey has the first, from more than 300 respondents ^[1]. Batch processing prices have risen since the pandemic, and further increases are expected across the rest of the decade ^[2].