In 2025, driven by a bull market in innovative drugs, the Hang Seng Healthcare Index ultimately achieved an impressive annual gain of 56.95%. However, during this market trend driven by fluctuations in innovative drug stocks, the performance of CXO (Contract Research, Development, and Manufacturing Organization) stocks was equally outstanding. Taking WUXI BIO (02269), a leading CXO stock in Hong Kong, as an example, its share price surged 79.04% in 2025, significantly outperforming the index. As we moved into 2026, the Hong Kong biopharmaceutical sector once again exhibited strong momentum, with WUXI BIO leading the CXO segment with a "six consecutive green candles" rally, closing above HKD 40 per share on January 14 and achieving a peak intra-year gain exceeding 28%. This reflects a market re-rating of the innovative drug industry chain and the certainty of upstream delivery, while also indicating sustained investor willingness to allocate funds to leading CXO enterprises.
On the evening of January 11, WUXI BIO fired the starting shot for its accelerated valuation recovery in 2026 with a significant announcement. The accelerated growth trajectory behind the heavyweight data reveals that the swift transition from Research (R) to Development (D) and finally to Manufacturing (M) is the key driver of the company's rapid expansion. In 2025, WUXI BIO added 209 new integrated projects, two-thirds of which were bispecific/multispecific antibodies and antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), with approximately half of these new projects originating from the United States, bringing the total integrated project count to 945. Specifically, propelled by its CRDMO business model and the "Follow and Win the Molecule" strategy, WUXI BIO's integrated project number grew rapidly in 2025, with annual new integrated projects exceeding 200 for the first time. The company currently has 463 preclinical projects, a year-on-year increase of 15.17%; 383 early-stage (Phase I and II) clinical development projects (289 Phase I and 94 Phase II), up 16.77% year-on-year; and late-stage (Phase III) clinical development projects along with commercial manufacturing projects increased to 99 (74 Phase III and 25 commercial projects), a growth of 13.79% year-on-year, strongly validating the company's robust business momentum and endogenous growth capability.
It is noteworthy that two-thirds of WUXI BIO's new projects in 2025 focused on the ADC and bispecific/multispecific antibody fields. Taking the bispecific/multispecific antibody business as an example, the number of such projects in the company's R&D pipeline currently stands at 196, a 30% year-on-year increase; all three commercial projects are high-potential assets. From a revenue perspective, revenue from the bispecific/multispecific antibody segment grew by over 120% during the period, contributing nearly 20% of the company's total revenue, and is defined by the company as its "fastest-growing and most profitable" engine. In essence, this upgrade in business and revenue structure is not merely a simple expansion of service offerings but represents a deep excavation of the "golden funnel" effect within WUXI BIO's operations. Currently, the company's "Research Services" (R-end) are demonstrating value potential and monetization capabilities akin to a biotech company. In cutting-edge areas like CD3 TCEs, the company achieved a record high in upfront payments for R-end collaboration projects in 2025, with total potential milestone payments reaching up to USD 4 billion.
This not only confirms the high growth trajectory of the bispecific/multispecific antibody sector in recent years but also highlights WUXI BIO's strategic positioning in high-potential areas of biologics: the layout in R-end services enables the company to capture opportunities in innovative therapies earlier and more precisely, securing a dominant competitive niche and locking in a large number of promising projects in advance, thereby continuously feeding high-value conversions to the downstream D-end and M-end businesses. This evolution is shifting WUXI BIO's platform appeal from advantages in "cost and efficiency" to the稀缺 value of "cutting-edge technology implementation capability," a concrete manifestation of the company's value moat. Furthermore, the market has also clearly recognized WUXI BIO's continuously improving commercial conversion capability. The Process Performance Qualification (PPQ) batch is a critical final step before commercial drug production, and its quantity is often a key indicator for predicting a CXO company's manufacturing revenue over the next 1-3 years. Based on existing contract expectations, WUXI BIO's PPQ count is projected to increase from 28 in 2025 to 34 in 2026. The steady growth in PPQ batches further strengthens the visibility of long-term growth in the company's M-end segment.
In recent years, benefiting from its long-adhered unique CRDMO business model, WUXI BIO has enhanced its value creation capabilities across multiple dimensions, from technological depth to geographical breadth, evolving from a traditional service provider into a platform company empowering global innovative biologic drug development. While the surface framework of the business model might be imitated, the competitive barriers embedded in the core of WUXI BIO's value are difficult to replicate. On one hand, the pharmaceutical industry exhibits significant economies of scale, with a client conversion rate exceeding 90% from R to D to M, allowing leading CXO firms to continuously widen the gap through resource integration—WUXI BIO's "the strong get stronger" trend vividly embodies this logic. On the other hand, the company has achieved deep value integration with its clients: the integrated RDM services empower biotechs to accelerate their R&D processes. Over the past five years, 72 WUXI BIO clients have been successfully acquired, with an average valuation of USD 1.4 billion, collectively creating over USD 100 billion in market value.
This astounding figure underscores a strategic partnership that far exceeds ordinary service relationships, signifying WUXI BIO's irreplaceable strategic partner status within the global biologic drug innovation chain. The underlying logic reflects WUXI BIO's unique value creation capability: as a leading global CRDMO, it provides clients with irreplaceable advantages in technology, capacity, and speed. The depth of its technological platforms and the breadth of its geographical reach are key to the irreplaceability of its services. Technologically, over the years, WUXI BIO has developed strong technical expertise and extensive experience in biologics R&D, independently creating advanced platforms such as the WuXiBody™ bispecific antibody platform, the highly efficient continuous bioprocessing platform WuXiUP™, and the high-intensity fed-batch bioprocessing platform WuXiUI™. In 2025, the company also launched the WuXiHigh™ 2.0 high-concentration formulation platform and the WuXia™ TrueSite targeted integration cell line platform. Recently, WUXI BIO introduced the industry-leading digital twin platform, PatroLab™, which represents a major leap from traditional static offline testing to real-time, non-invasive monitoring.
Geographically, WUXI BIO is continuously enhancing its global footprint and capability building. Its global service network now extends from China, Ireland, Germany, the US, and Singapore to Qatar in the Middle East, forming a strategic "six global poles" layout. Starting from 2029, the company expects to have large-scale production capacity of 370,000 liters operational, with an expected annual biologic drug output of 30 tons. This expansion is not merely geographical but represents the systematic replication of capacity, technology, and compliance capabilities. The "Global Dual-Site" strategy not only meets global clients' needs for supply chain diversification but also allows for the rapid replication of mature production processes and management systems, successfully proven in Chinese facilities, to overseas locations, achieving a global export of "WUXI BIO efficiency." Taking the planned first CRDMO center in the Middle East in Qatar as an example, this strategy aligns perfectly with the ambition of Middle Eastern nations to establish biopharmaceuticals as a strategic emerging industry.
When investors comprehensively assess the information conveyed by WUXI BIO at the JPM conference, it becomes evident that complex molecules like bispecifics/multispecifics/ADCs and the impending wave of commercial manufacturing endow the company with highly certain endogenous growth potential. Concurrently, the continuous deepening of its cutting-edge technology and global network system drives simultaneous growth in both the quantity and quality of projects, solidifying the powerful "R-D-M" growth engines. These multi-layered, interlocking factors collectively construct a "CRDMO+ model" growth flywheel with strong inertia, further enhancing the company's investment certainty. From a global biopharmaceutical market perspective, in recent years, global Multinational Corporations (MNCs), driven by patent cliffs and pricing pressures, have shown strong motivation to expand their pipelines. MNC merger and acquisition spending approached USD 100 billion in 2025, a nearly 50% year-on-year increase. Coupled with the cyclical improvement in biotech financing amid potential interest rate cuts, the upgrade of the biologics R&D industry is unstoppable, poised to propel comprehensive new molecule CXOs into an accelerated upward trajectory.
Against this backdrop, WUXI BIO, through its unique CRDMO+ model, has established a comprehensive service platform combining economies of scale, technological depth, and global delivery capability. Following the full integration of the R, D, and M industrial chain, WUXI BIO's revenue structure is set to evolve significantly compared to its peers: beyond traditional CDMO profits, new increments will come from "BD upfront payments + milestone payments + sales royalties + cell line royalties." In the future, this unique business and revenue model is expected to drive significant value re-rating for WUXI BIO in the secondary market over the next 3-5 years. From a secondary market standpoint, in 2025, buoyed by the Hong Kong healthcare bull market, the company achieved substantial valuation repair, with its share price accumulating gains of nearly 80%. However, even after this strong rebound, WUXI BIO's PE ratio stands at only 33.76x, lower than its global peers Lonza and Samsung Biologs, which trade at PE ratios of 51.84x and 102.90x respectively, indicating significant long-term investment value.
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