Manufacturing deals saw an unusual burst of activity recently, with a spike in the number of contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) acquiring facilities from pharma companies.
These were led by Samsung Biologics, which completed its acquisition of a Rockville, US, manufacturing facility from GSK and was one of three such pharma-to-CDMO agreements from 15 March to 15 April. In contrast, just two deals of this type emerged across the eight months before 15 March 2026.
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The agreements were captured in the latest edition of GlobalData’s monthly Bio/Pharmaceutical Outsourcing Report, part of which tracks contract manufacturing mergers, acquisitions and financing deals.
The pharma-to-CDMO facility sales come as pharmaceutical companies retool their manufacturing needs amid industry-wide moves to onshore US domestic manufacturing in the face of increasing tariff threats. In 2025, some of the industry’s largest investments were made by Roche, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson, whose combined plans were worth $155bn.
GSK was another of the pharma companies announcing billion-dollar manufacturing investments in the US last year, and one of those taking the opportunity to adjust its in-house operations.
The company’s deal with Samsung hands the South Korean company its first US manufacturing presence and an additional 60,000L of drug substance capacity, increasing its global capacity by almost 8% to 845,000L.
Samsung plans further investments to add capabilities and strengthen long-term operations at the Rockville site, which can already support both clinical and commercial biologics production across multiple manufacturing scales from its two cGMP manufacturing plants.
Meanwhile, GSK will continue to benefit from the site, with Samsung supplying the pharma company with the products previously manufactured there. But signposting GSK’s reduced needs from the facility, Samsung will transition to serve additional contract manufacturing needs.
Another pharma-to-CDMO facility sale that completed between 15 March and 15 April involved Bristol Myers Squibb and Rois, the CDMO business of Laboratorios Farmaceuticos Rovi. Rois acquired a BMS injectables manufacturing facility in Phoenix, US, in an agreement that will also see the CDMO continue to manufacture products at its new site for the pharma company.
The third of the three recent deals, and the only one outside the US, saw Adragos Pharma finalise its acquisition of a sterile fill-finish facility from Sanofi located in Maisons-Alfort, France, as part of the CDMO’s moves to strengthen its European injectables network.
Taken together, the trio of deals are an acceleration in a direction of travel that encompassed Celltrion completing its purchase of Eli Lilly’s site in Branchburg, US, in January and before that Thermo Fisher Scientific completing its September 2025 acquisition of a sterile fill-finish and packaging site in Ridgefield, US, from Sanofi, with the outsourcing company folding that facility into its pharma services business within its Laboratory Products and Biopharma Services segment.
These types of deals provide valuable expansion opportunities for the outsourcing sector and can give greater flexibility to pharma companies wanting to reconfigure their US manufacturing footprints.
