Eurofins continues to make progress in leasing less, owning more strategic sites

Laboratory testing services giant Eurofins, with more than 950 labs in nearly 60 countries, has made a concerted effort in recent years to lease less and own more of its strategic sites with land reserved for future expansion — a strategy that appears to be paying off.

Since 2018, the net floor area of buildings owned by Eurofins has more than tripled from 240,000 square meters to 905,000 square meters, which includes an increase last year of 43% or 273,000 square meters.

CEO Gilles Martin in a conference call last week with analysts and investors said thanks to the company’s decade-long program to replace facility leasing with ownership, its global footprint is taking shape and Eurofins is “very far along” in completing its hub and spoke laboratory network — particularly in Europe and North America.

“Now, we own most of our big sites,” Martin said, adding that “we usually have land” set aside near existing facilities for future expansion to avoid losing leasehold improvement investments, as demand increases for those operations. The advantage of ownership of these sites is that Eurofins can incrementally add capacity on these sites as needed.    

In 2025, Eurofins added 40,000 square meters in total surface area of owned sites through development and third-party acquisitions, while the surface area leased from third parties increased by only 6,000 square meters, according to the company.

Last week, Eurofins provided 2025 financial results reporting that there was “softness” in some ancillary biopharma end markets last year. In North America, Martin told analysts and investors that market conditions for the company’s biopharma services “were varied” in 2025. He said that biopharma is “starting to recover” while the sector is still “far from what we think we can achieve long term.”

Eurofins CDMO Alphora

The company’s biopharma services network includes its contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) business — Eurofins CDMO Alphora, based in Mississauga, Ontario, near Toronto — which supports the entire drug development cycle.

Eurofins CDMO Alphora provides active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) and drug product development services to pharma and biotech customers for complex, niche, and small molecule programs from preclinical to Phase III to commercial manufacturing.

Last year at this time, Eurofins said bookings for 2025 were “robust” in the CDMO segment, reflecting increased activity compared to the last couple of years.

However, during last week’s earnings conference call, Martin said Eurofins CDMO Alphora “did well” in the first half of 2025 having “filled a tranche that got completed” but “a bit less” in the last quarter of the year “because now it’s full and we’re going to have a next tranche coming up online in the next, I think, 24 months.”

Nonetheless, Eurofins CDMO Alphora is building a new 130,000-square foot GMP biologics facility slated for completion in 2026. The facility’s capabilities will include delivering integrated biologics development and antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) services under one roof, advancing biomanufacturing not just in Canada but for North America as well.

“This expansion strengthens our ability to support innovators from early development through to commercial manufacturing,” the company said. The facility will feature 2000L bioreactor scale capacity, a sterile fill-finish line with a capacity of up to 24.9 million units annually, single-use production train, as well as advanced Quality by Design frameworks.

Eurofins CDMO Alphora last week announced it has developed and implemented an artificial intelligence-based software platform to support high-throughput salt and co-crystal screening. The AI-powered tool is now a core component of the company’s solid-state screening programs and is designed to predict the likelihood of salt and co-crystal formation for active pharmaceutical ingredients and intermediates.

Developed internally in collaboration with a local university, the platform uses machine learning models to support solid-form selection during drug substance development.