Our Priorities in 2024

In 2024, we continued to support complex customer needs across the entire treatment lifecycle by focusing on five priorities: service, scope, sustainability, solutions and speed¹. These enabled us to effectively address our customers' evolving needs.

Service

Exceptional customer service is fundamental to building lasting relationships and differentiating the Lonza CDMO offering. We work to earn customer trust and loyalty through our consistent focus on operational excellence, our strong track record on quality, and our commitment to delivering value and right-first time.

In 2024, we continued to prioritize continuous improvement and operational excellence across the business. We advanced efficiency by implementing Operational Excellence initiatives across multiple sites and enabling functions. We continued to maintain our strong focus on Lean operating principles and enhanced the efficiency of our Quality Control operations. In addition, 11,000 of our global colleagues have now completed our Lean training program to guide their continuous improvement activities and deliver outstanding customer service. Since the start of 2022, we have successfully executed around 2,000 Lean projects to drive efficiency and value across our operations. These efforts have contributed to our high customer satisfaction ratings.

In 2024, we ran our Lonza Promoter Score (LPS) survey for the fifth consecutive year and gathered more than 1,900 responses. The survey provides a quantifiable and consistent measure of customer engagement across Lonza. Aligned with previous results, the 2024 LPS survey found that our customers continue to value our highly skilled employee community. In addition, the quality of our services and products was also widely acknowledged. This feedback was consistent across our customer base.

Scope

We have one of the most complete offerings in the CDMO industry across modalities, scales and phases, enabling us to help our customers in bringing new drugs to market quickly and securely. We provide end-to-end support from pre-clinical stages to commercialization, and our expertise spans both drug substance and drug product.

Our breadth of offerings is strengthened by our growth strategy, which focuses on building capability and capacity in areas of high market potential. In 2024, we progressed with 22 large growth projects – 50% of which are now in construction and 20% in ramp up.

Our approach to organic growth is illustrated by our growing Bioconjugates portfolio. In 2024, we invested in technologies to manufacture bioconjugates at different scales, further strengthening our integrated supply chain. To allow us to support further ADC drug candidates through to commercialization, we expanded our offering to include filling lines in Stein (CH) and Basel (CH), which are specifically designed to manufacture highly-potent compounds. We are also expanding bioconjugation capacity in Visp (CH) with the addition of three large-scale suites to meet growing demand for commercial large-scale manufacturing. The suites will include both customer-dedicated and multipurpose spaces to meet the needs of new and existing customers.

Our organic growth portfolio is supported by bolt-on acquisitions in areas of sustained customer need and high market potential. In 2024, we expanded our mammalian manufacturing network with the acquisition of the Genentech large-scale manufacturing site in Vacaville (US) from Roche. This strategic acquisition has created a significant West Coast commercial manufacturing presence close to San Francisco’s pharma and biotech hub, complementing our existing East Coast manufacturing site in Portsmouth, as well as our international network. With a total bioreactor capacity of around 330,000 liters, the Vacaville site is one of the largest biologics manufacturing facilities in the world. This acquisition, alongside the addition of six 20,000L bioreactors in Visp (CH), which will commence operations in H1 2025, further strengthens our capability to meet our customers’ long-term commercial supply needs.

Our scope further expanded with new offerings in 2024. Building on more than 20 years of experience in the spray-drying of biologics (including monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), oligonucleotides and peptides), we now offer spray-drying of biologics for clinical supply and beyond. Our new clinical offering further strengthens our spray-drying expertise and provides manufacturing capacity from early-phase to commercial supply. This expertise and capability enable our customers to bring innovative new medicines to patients with unmet medical needs.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a critical component of our strategy and an ethical imperative for our business. We reached multiple sustainability milestones in 2024 and achieved progress in all of our key environmental metrics.

The Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) approved our near-term target to reduce absolute Scope 1 and 2 GHG emissions¹ by 42% by the end of 2030 (against the 2021 base year), alongside our supplier engagement target for Scope 3 emissions¹. Achieving these goals will support our overall target to achieve net zero by 2050 or before.

To support our emissions reduction journey, we have made significant progress in the adoption of renewable electricity. Half of our electricity is now procured from renewable sources; supported by the start of photovoltaic production in Spain under Virtual Power Purchasing Agreements, covering all EU and Swiss sites. Furthermore, in Q2 2024, we signed multiple long-term Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) agreements in the United States which will begin to offset the majority of our US emissions from the end of 2025.

Our activities are guided by our continuing dedication to integrity and ethical conduct. Our successful efforts in this area were recognized by Ethisphere, a global leader in defining and advancing the standards of ethical business practices. In 2024, for the third time, we were honored to be one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies^®. Lonza is one of just two companies headquartered in Switzerland included in the 2024 ranking, and one of just four companies named within the pharmaceuticals category of the Ethisphere ranking.

We made further progress on improving supply chain engagement. As part of these efforts, we launched a learning series on emission reductions and hosted our first online Responsible Supplier Event with more than 1,100 participants. This was designed to empower both employees and suppliers to actively contribute to our sustainability goals.. 

Solutions

By delivering end-to-end services supported by scientific, regulatory, and manufacturing expertise, we build strong and lasting customer relationships. In Small Molecules, we continued to address the increasing complexity of the clinical pipeline with the launch of our AI-enabled Route Scouting Service offering. This aims to streamline synthetic route identification for novel active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). It provides customers with synthetic pathways that are more resilient from a supply chain perspective and offers insights into optimal route design for both clinical and commercial manufacturing.

In Capsules & Health Ingredients, we launched the Innovaform™ Accelerator center at our Colmar (FR) site, designed to co-innovate with pharmaceutical customers on formulation and encapsulation solutions. This new facility serves as a Center of Excellence to support the development of innovative drug delivery for oral and pulmonary administration, addressing challenges such as solubility and bioavailability in APIs. It provides expertise and technology platforms for small molecules, peptide proteins, and nucleic acid-based therapies. This initiative aims to accelerate drug development timelines and reduce manufacturing costs. 

Speed

We enable our customers to accelerate the path to commercialization by leveraging advanced manufacturing capabilities, scalable facilities, and scientific expertise. We are also supporting our customers’ speed to market with flexible business models and strategic collaborations.

In Cell & Gene, we announced a long-term commercial supply agreement with Vertex for CASGEVY^®. CASGEVY^® is the first cell therapy based on the Nobel Prize winning CRISPR/Cas9 technology. It offers the potential of a one-time treatment for eligible patients with transfusion-dependent beta-thalassemia or sickle cell disease. Under the terms of the agreement, Vertex will leverage our scientific, regulatory and manufacturing expertise, global manufacturing network, and first-hand experience in the commercial manufacture of cell therapy products. We will manufacture CASGEVY^® at the state-of-the-art cGMP cell therapy manufacturing facilities in Geleen (NL), with plans to expand to our Portsmouth (US) facility.

In Biologics, we enable our customers to accelerate the path to commercialization by simplifying and innovating critical processes for emerging modalities, including analytical testing. While the fast-growing but still relatively small mRNA market relies on traditional technologies, faster and more effective analytics can streamline regulatory review and development. Through our collaboration with Oxford Nanopore, we are developing a cGMP-validated test to directly sequence DNA templates and mRNA, enabling faster, simultaneous analysis of critical quality attributes. This innovation could streamline quality control, reduce testing time and expedite the path to market for mRNA products including vaccines for infectious diseases.