WuXi reveals steep increase in quarterly manufacturing revenues
Last week, Wuxi announced that net revenues for the fourth quarter increased more than 25% year over year to $157.2m (€113m) with the contribution from its manufacturing business growing some 72.5% year over year to $37.8m (€27.3m).
Dr. Ge Li, chairman and CEO of WuXi, said, “Through strong revenue growth and good cost control in the fourth quarter, we exceeded our revenue and diluted EPS guidance for the third consecutive quarter.
All segments of the company contributed to our fourth-quarter revenue growth, with particularly good performances by small-molecule manufacturing, biologics, and integrated drug discovery services.”
As far as the next fiscal year is concerned, WuXi seems confident that its successes will continue.
“We express our belief that many of the favorable trends of 2013 will continue in 2014,” Dr. Li continued. “We expect year-over-year revenue growth of 14-16% in 2014, driven by broad-based business growth in all our service segments…reflecting strong revenue growth and investment in talent, laboratories, and technologies, particularly in manufacturing, biologics, genomics, R&D, sales and marketing, and information technology.”
Servicing shift
The company is looking to benefit from shifting from an R&D service provider to becoming an R&D service and solution provider by creating an open-access technology and service platform that enables anyone and any company to discover, develop, and commercialize innovative healthcare products to benefit the world’s patients, Dr. Li concluded.
“With such a platform, the biopharmaceutical industry’s great minds can realize their dreams of introducing important new therapeutics for patients faster and more cost-effectively,” he said.
Total net revenues for the next year are supposed to be between $660-670 million, or 14-16% year-over-year growth.
Capital expenditures are expected to hit about $85m, a year-over-year increase of about 50%, driven primarily by capacity expansion in small-molecule manufacturing and investment in laboratories and technology Q1 2014 guidance.
