The contract manufacturing industry for finished dose pharmaceuticals had the lowest growth rate in a decade in 2020, according to GlobalData estimates. The leading data and analytics company reveals that total commercial dose contract manufacturing organization (CMO) contract revenue in 2020 grew by only 2.4% over 2019 revenue.

Adam Bradbury, Pharma Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a barrier to revenue growth for many dose CMOs. However, a subset of those CMOs – companies involved in the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and therapies – experienced revenue growth driven by the pandemic.”

CMOs producing finished dose medicines with annual revenue over $500m experienced the largest growth between 2019–2020. The top eight dose contract manufacturing companies, including industry leaders, accounted for 36% of all dose revenues. Some of the largest dose CMOs such as Catalent, Recipharm, Baxter Biopharma Solutions, Emergent BioSolutions Inc, Delpharm, Siegfried Holding, and Thermo-Fisher Scientific (through its subsidiary Patheon) are dose manufacturing the marketed COVID-19 vaccines.

Bradbury continues: “Many of the low revenue tier dose CMOs have shown negative growth between 2019 and 2020. These also tend to be the less innovative CMOs unable to contribute to novel COVID-19 pipeline and commercial products.

“Injectables manufacture has been in demand during the pandemic, which is to be expected given the extensive contract manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines and the insufficient capacity for the scale of production required. Contract injectable manufacture has become increasingly important as COVID-19 vaccines have become approved, manufactured, and distributed wide-scale globally.”