Sartorius says 2024 was challenging for life science, but weakness in demand is ending
While 2024 was another year of challenging market conditions for Sartorius and the life science industry, the German pharma and lab equipment company sees a better business environment ahead, according to its annual report released on Monday.
“For the entire life science industry, 2024 was characterized by a challenging market situation: the pandemic-related destocking at customers, which lasted much longer than expected, the reluctance to invest, and the Chinese market, which remained very weak,” according to the company.
Last year, Sartorius’ Lab Products & Services Division was impacted by “weak end markets, particularly in China, where pronounced reluctance to invest on the customer side continued to dampen demand.” However, in its Bioprocess Solutions Division, the order situation saw a significant upturn in the second half of 2024.
Sartorius said that business development in the second half of last year, and especially in the final quarter of 2024, confirms its estimate that the “temporary weakness in demand is coming to an end and that the industry will gradually return to its robust, structurally underlying growth trend.”
In 2024, the German company generated sales revenue of more than $3.5 billion, which Sartorius CEO Joachim Kreuzburg said in the annual report was “on a par with the previous year” and nearly twice as high as in 2019, “the last year before the pandemic and its effects.”
For 2025, Sartorius expects continuous demand recovery and growth in the life science industry, “albeit at a rate still below the long-term average,” according to Kreuzburg. “In this environment, we intend to grow profitably above market level, and to achieve a moderate increase in sales revenue.”
In terms of investments last year, Kreuzburg said Sartorius completed an innovation center for bioprocesses in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and a center of excellence for bioanalytics in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “In Songdo, one of South Korea’s most important biopharma centers, we progressed with the construction of our new production site for consumables and cell culture media,” he noted.
Kreuzburg, who has been at the helm of the company for 22 years, will hand over the chairmanship of the Sartorius Executive Board at the end of June and will be succeeded by Michael Grosse as CEO on July 1. Grosse has held various management and board positions over the past two decades in the packaging industry for the pharma and food sector.