Just days after sewing up a pair of $897 million deals with Pfizer, Samsung Biologics has added a few hundred million dollars more to its partnership cash pile—this time courtesy of an expanded pact with Novartis.
Monday, Samsung Bio said in a regulatory filing that it’s inked a $390.9 million deal to help crank out Novartis drugs. The latest production pact builds on an earlier Samsung-Novartis tie-up worth $81 million in June 2022.
Last week, meanwhile, Samsung Bio said Pfizer had added $486 million to two biosimilar production accords the companies made in early 2023. In June, the partners signed a contract for the Korean CDMO to produce biosimilar drugs in the fields of immunology, oncology and inflammation.
And in March, the companies linked up on a deal worth $193 million, according to a regulatory filing.
Samsung’s Novartis deal comes in below that Pfizer deal from June. Still, the Novartis tie-up now represents Samsung’s second-biggest production pact ever, taking silver over a $360 million deal with AstraZeneca.
It isn’t immediately clear which Novartis drugs Samsung Bio will manufacture.
So far, in 2023 alone, Samsung has sealed a cumulative $1.7 in manufacturing orders, Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports.
Apart from its agreements with big pharma players, Samsung Bio has been on a major expansion tear in recent years—or, as the company puts it, “continuous capacity expansion.”
Back in March, the Korean manufacturing juggernaut announced plans to start construction of its Plant 5 in the first half of 2023, with a view to commence operations there in 2025.
Samsung is pouring 1.9 trillion South Korean won ($1.46 billion) into the project, which will add 180,000 liters of capacity to the complex in Incheon, bringing total capacity to 784,000 liters, the most at a single site in the industry.