German pharma and lab equipment company Sartorius announced that it achieved significant profitable growth in the first quarter of 2025, with net profit jumping 21.4% and sales revenue increasing 7.7% in Q1 on a reported basis.
Sartorius credited the “strong start to the year” to a nearly 10% revenue increase in the quarter for its Bioprocess Solutions division, which supports the manufacture of biopharmaceuticals.
“Demand for biologics — often the only effective therapies for severe diseases — will continue to rise sustainably, along with the strong need for innovative technologies that make their development and manufacture faster and more efficient,” CEO Joachim Kreuzburg said in a statement.
While Sartorius has “gotten off to a very good start to the new year” with a strong trend in its consumables business, Kreuzburg said that “customers are still cautious about investing in lab instruments and bioprocessing equipment, as expected.”
The Q1 performance of its Lab Products & Services division, which specializes in life science research and pharmaceutical laboratories, was down 5.5% — well below expectations — driven by weakness in capital equipment, according to Leerink Partners analysts.
“Consumables were strong but bioanalytical equipment was again weaker, partially driven by an air pocket following large lab capacity expansion in 2023,” the analysts wrote in a Wednesday note to investors.
In 2024, 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,” according to its annual report released in February 2025. It’s a trend that appears to be continuing this year.
However, in its Bioprocess Solutions division, the order situation saw a significant upturn in the second half of 2024 and continuing in 2025, with Q1 sales revenue increasing by almost 10% compared to consensus expectations of approximately 7%.
“Consumables momentum continues to be robust, with customer inventory destocking largely over but capital equipment investment still cautious,” Leerink Partners analysts noted. “Capital equipment (i.e., bioreactor installs, chromatography/filtration systems) investment continues to be soft in customer channels,” while Sartorius management indicated “customer inventory stock was close to normal levels, following similar comments in prior quarter.”
The year ahead, tariffs
Looking ahead, Sartorius expects group sales to grow around 6% in 2025, with Bioprocess Solutions projected to grow approximately 7% while Lab Products & Services is expected to grow about 1% — with a forecast range of plus or minus two percentage points due to elevated market volatility.
On Wednesday’s earnings call, Kreuzburg said that Sartorius doesn’t expect any impact on the company’s competitive positioning from tariffs given that its global supply chains operate with a “region for region” approach to manufacturing. At the same time, he said a “number of mitigating measures” are currently being defined and are underway, including tariff surcharges and “a further shift of certain production volumes.”
Leerink Partners analysts noted that Sartorius management said the company has “the ability to localize manufacturing for an incremental 10% U.S. sales in a matter of months but said they are unlikely to shift more than that for the time being.”
Kreuzburg told analysts on Wednesday’s conference call that a little bit more than a third of what Sartorius sells in the U.S. is manufactured in the country. He also highlighted some of Sartorius’ infrastructure investments in the U.S. last year, including the completion of an innovation center for bioprocesses in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and a center of excellence for bioanalytics in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
At the end of June, Kreuzburg — who has been at the helm of the company for 22 years — will hand over the chairmanship of the Sartorius Executive Board 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.