By Bernadette Hogg and Orest Dovhan
Jan 28 (Reuters) – Switzerland’s Lonza, the world’s largest contract drug manufacturer, on Wednesday forecast slower sales growth for its core contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) business in 2026.
Lonza sees sales growth of 11% to 12% at constant exchange rates for the business area, which makes up the core of its business after the capsule and health ingredients (CHI) unit was classified as discontinued ahead of a planned sale.
The forecast compares to constant currency growth of 21.7% in 2025 and analysts’ 12.1% growth estimate for 2026 in a Vara consensus poll.
Last year’s growth was boosted by the 2024 acquisition of the Vacaville site in California, which added 600 million francs in sales or around 11 percentage points of growth, analysts said. From 2026, the site’s contributions are expected to be broadly stable.
The weakening U.S. dollar is expected to have a negative impact of around 2% on Lonza’s sales and core earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) in 2026, the company said.
Sales growth will be higher in the first half of 2026 than in the second, it added.
In 2025, growth was driven by the higher than expected contribution from Vacaville and good momentum across its mammalian, bioconjugates, small molecules, drug product and bioscience technology platforms, Lonza said.
That was supported by a fifth commercial contract for Vacaville, which Lonza said was experiencing strong customer interest.
“We have a couple of late-stage negotiations ongoing,” finance chief Philippe Deecke said in a call with journalists.
The site, which Lonza bought from Roche in 2024, will offset declining contract volumes with Roche Genentech with the new contracts from other customers and remain at around 30% utilization, Deecke added.
The Basel-based group said its core profit margin, or ratio of core EBITDA to sales in the continuing business, was 31.6% in 2025, beating the 30.7% expected by analysts.
Lonza expects this margin to grow to more than 32% of sales in 2026.
($1 = 0.7654 Swiss francs)
(Reporting by Bernadette Hogg and Orest Dovhan in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
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