Consolidation prevalent in industry, says third largest CMO

In the last few months the Aenova Group acquired Munich, Germany-headquartered Haupt Pharma​, whilst Patheon closed its $2.65bn (€1.9bn) merger​ of DSM’s pharma division. Last week, Outsourcing-Pharma.com met up with Aenova’s VP of Marketing and Sales, Brad Carlson, at Interphex in New York to ask whether such acquisitions were demonstrative of the contract manufacturing industry as a whole.

“I think there is still a space for the small companies, but clearly there is a merger and acquisition trend going on in the larger companies,”​ Carlson told us, highlighting the Aenova and Patheon deals in such examples.

“We found this to be a very important strategy for our company, both [to increase] the global footprint and also the breadth of services.”​

Top Three CMO​

Carlson said Aenova was “now the third largest CMO in the world,”​ yet the Aenova Group only began life in 2008 when softgel company Swiss Caps and Dragenopharm – a maker of other solid dosage forms – combined.

Since then the company has added ointments, creams, liquids, and suppositories capabilities with the 2012 acquisition of the Temmler Group​ and, with Haupt, can now offer amongst other services, sterile injectables, freeze-drying, beta-lactams, and oral contraceptives.

 “[The] combination of these companies has given us essentially a full breadth of services and also a global footprint, matching ourselves up with, let’s say, Patheon and Catalent, the two largest CMOs.”​

He continued: “We still have our eyes set on some additional items we’d like to do, markets we’d like to enter and so on, so I think you’ll continue to see this happening with our company as well as others.”​

Future Growth and New Markets​

Carlson said Aenova was still in growth mode, and whilst it would concentrate less on acquisitions focusing on dosage forms (as “we’ve covered the breadth of services pretty well,”​ he told us), new geographical markets would be the target.

“Our company is primarily based out of Europe,”​ he told us, with 19 of the firm’s 21 facilities located there. “I think you’ll see us expanding outside of that region in our facilities and acquisitions.”​

Furthermore, whilst Aenova and CMOs generally are eying up areas such as Latin America and Australia, he said the North American market should not be omitted.

“The US market is the number one market for the consumer healthcare and pharma customers, so obviously the CMOs have to play in these markets.”​ However, he continued, “there is a tremendous amount of growth in Latin America, Asia-Pacific, Australia, where multinationals will have to go.”​