Adicon Holdings (09860) acquires 100% of Guanke Biotech's shares, and China's ICL leaders restructure the CRO pattern across borders
In a complex environment where the global biomedical innovation wave intertwines with the cold winter of capital, China's CXO industry is ushering in a new round of strategic integration. Recently, as a leading third-party medical testing company in China, Adicon Holdings (09860) completed an important acquisition and is actively entering the broader field of drug research and development.
According to the announcement, the company plans to acquire 100% of the issued shares of Crown Bioscience (Crown Bioscience), the world's leading CRO in oncology, at a basic consideration of approximately US$204 million, which is expected to be completed by mid-2026. It is worth noting that the EV/EBITDA ratio corresponding to this transaction is only about 7 times. Compared with the price-earnings ratio of companies such as Baiaosetu and Yakkang Biotech in the pre-clinical CRO field, which generally exceeds 50 times, it shows a significant valuation advantage.
This marks the official transformation of Adicom Holdings from the ICL field to a dual track of “clinical testing+drug development services”, and also injects new variables into the global pharmaceutical R&D service industry landscape.
According to the Zhitong Finance App, this acquisition is not an accident; it is an inevitable result of Addicon accurately grasping the three elements of “time, place, and people”. Each link implied Addicon's strategic vision of laying out the global pharmaceutical value chain.
Tianshi: The industry cycle is picking up, and policies resonate with global demand
The benefits of “Tianshi” stem from the simultaneous resonance of the macro environment, industrial policy, and capital sentiment, creating an excellent window for transactions.
First, global pharmaceutical research and development is speeding up the “return of blood,” and China's innovative drug ecosystem continues to expand. Since the second half of 2024, the R&D pace of multinational pharmaceutical companies and Biotech has gradually escaped the impact of early adjustments, and demand for outsourced services has rebounded markedly. Meanwhile, China's innovative drug ecosystem continues to prosper. In the first half of 2025 alone, 43 innovative drugs were approved for marketing by the State Drug Administration, an increase of 59% over the previous year. Policy combinations such as improving review and approval efficiency and optimizing health insurance negotiation mechanisms continued to unleash the domestic demand potential for pharmaceutical research and development.
Second, the CRO market is expanding steadily, and China has become the core engine of global growth. According to Frost & Sullivan data, the global CRO service market has surpassed 98.4 billion US dollars in 2024 and is expected to rise to 139.8 billion US dollars in 2029; while the Chinese market performed even better, with a compound annual growth rate of 21.0% from 2020 to 2024, far exceeding the global average of 12.2%. Even if the growth rate gradually stabilizes in the future, China's position as an important pole of global pharmaceutical innovation has become more and more stable, providing fertile ground for local companies to “overtake the curve” through mergers and acquisitions.
Finally, improvements in the international environment compounded a recovery in capital confidence, and high-quality assets ushered in a revaluation. After experiencing early industry adjustments, investors have regained confidence in CXO assets with core technical barriers, global layout, and real synergy effects. At this time, Addicon Holdings used reasonable valuations to target scarce targets. It not only grasped the valuation window, but also sent a clear signal of strategic upgrading to the market, laying the foundation of capital trust for subsequent global expansion.
Location: A golden track for card cancer, building a technical moat that cannot be replicated
The advantage of “geographical advantage” is that Addicon accurately anchors accurate card positions in high-boom and high-barrier segments. The core target of this transaction, Coronary Biology, is the most strategically valuable “highland” in the global oncology CRO circuit.
In the global CRO service market, cancer and cardiovascular metabolic diseases are the two fastest growing treatment fields. Among them, tumors have occupied a central position for a long time due to intensive pipelines, large R&D investment, and high outsourcing penetration rate.
The Zhitong Finance App learned that Coronary Biotech, acquired by Addicon Holdings, was founded in 2006. It is the world's largest oncology specialist CRO, and has an irreplaceable asset advantage.
As a global new drug research and development technology platform company, Coronary Biotech provides research in the fields of in vivo and in vitro efficacy testing, drug screening, drug metabolism analysis, and translational medicine. Its core advantage is that it has the world's leading patient-derived xenograft (PDX) model library and organoid technology, as well as more than 5,000 high-quality in vivo/in vitro tumor models. This scale far exceeds that of peers and has built a solid competitive barrier.
In terms of customer resources, Crown Biotech's service network covers more than 1,100 biopharmaceuticals and biotechnology companies around the world, including 95% of the world's top 20 oncology pharmaceutical companies and about 65% of the top 50 global pharmaceutical companies. With stable service quality and cutting-edge scientific research capabilities, the customer retention rate of Coronary Biotech has been high in the industry for a long time, and its business foundation is “indestructible”.
It is worth mentioning that under the digital trend of pharmaceutical research and development, Coronary Biotech has also built a closed loop of “data + AI” technology. It not only launched innovative digital tools such as SYNAI and CrownLink, but also continued to explore the application of artificial intelligence in key areas such as drug discovery and efficacy prediction to ensure that its technical capabilities always lead the industry.
This series of “hard core” capabilities makes Coronary Biotech not only a CRO company, but also a “living database” that continuously accumulates oncology knowledge assets. Today, when cancer treatment is moving towards precision and individualization, the value of such assets is growing exponentially, making them the “best solution” for Addicon to lay out the drug development circuit.
People and peace: strategic vision is highly compatible, and synergy effects unleash multiplier value
The foundation of “people and peace” is a high degree of compatibility between the strategic visions of the two management teams, the complementary symbiosis of business capabilities, and the common pursuit of “jointly building a global new drug research and development ecosystem”. It is also the core guarantee for whether the transaction can release long-term value.
It is worth thinking about, why was Addicon able to successfully complete this strategic acquisition? The reason behind this is the deep empowerment of its controlling shareholder Carlyle Group. As the world's leading investment institution, Carlyle has rich investment experience and industrial resources in the healthcare field, and its professional judgment and capital operation capabilities provided strong support for this transaction.
In terms of business collaboration, Addicon Holdings has been deeply involved in the clinical testing market in China for more than 20 years, and has established a nationwide independent medical laboratory (ICL) network, extensive hospital cooperation system and mature accompanying diagnostic capabilities. As a global leader in preclinical and translational oncology research, Coronary Biology has a full chain of service capabilities in drug discovery, lead compound optimization, and efficacy evaluation. The strong combination of the two will achieve end-to-end integration from “target discovery - efficacy verification - clinical trial - accompanying diagnosis” for the first time, to provide global pharmaceutical customers with integrated R&D solutions in the true sense of the word, and significantly improve drug development efficiency and success rate of results transformation.
The necessity and urgency of this strategic shift is particularly evident in the comparison of the financial structures of the two sides: before the transaction, Addicon Holdings' revenue came from China's ICL business, only 1.2% involved CRO, and was basically limited to the local market; while of Crown Biotech's 2024 revenue, 50% came from North America, 27.5% came from Europe, 16% came from China, and over 80% of the business was aimed at overseas markets. Through this acquisition, Crown Biotech is expected to contribute about 28% of the Group's total revenue, strongly driving Adicom Holdings to accelerate its entry into the global CRO market and achieve a strategic upgrade from a local testing leader in China to a global integrated laboratory service platform. With Crown Biotech's mature international operation system and deep global customer resource network, the efficiency of Adicon Holdings' overseas business will be qualitatively improved, and as a result, Crown Biotech will become a key springboard for Adicon Holdings' efficient expansion of overseas business.
Furthermore, the two sides also have great potential for collaboration at the data asset level: Addicon Holdings holds massive real-world clinical samples and multi-omics test data, while Coronary Biology has accumulated rich databases of preclinical efficacy, biomarkers, and translational research. The deep integration of the two will build a “data gold mine” throughout the drug development cycle, provide strong data support and technical engines for AI-driven target discovery, accurate patient stratification, and accompanying diagnostic development, and further consolidate the central position of both parties in the future precision medicine ecosystem.
Taken together, this acquisition will inject strong second growth momentum into the steady growth of Eddycon Holdings' main testing business and open up a new growth curve. The stable and predictable cash flow generated by the company's ICL business effectively complements Crown Biotech's CRO service with high profit margins and high technical barriers, and has jointly built a balanced, cyclic-resistant, and highly scalable two-wheel drive business structure.
By integrating the core strengths of Addicon Holdings in the field of real-world clinical data and testing, and the deep accumulation of coronary biotechnology in translational medicine and biomarker development, the two sides will not only enhance overall operational leverage and explore diversified revenue sources, but will also create sustainable long-term value for shareholders in the process of connecting short-term biotechnology innovation momentum with long-term pharmaceutical R&D needs, and truly achieve the transformation of clinical results “from laboratory to hospital bed”.
As Addicon Holdings CEO Gao Song said, “This acquisition is an important milestone in Adicom's development process. By integrating Coronary Biotech's first-class CRO capabilities, we have been able to extend our business to a wider range of fields in the global healthcare value chain and achieve a leap from clinical testing to drug development and translational research.” Crown Biotech CEO John Gu also said, “We look forward to combining our research expertise with Addicon's strong testing resources.” This highly consistent strategic vision is the best footnote to “people and peace.”
Summarize
The acquisition of Crown Biotech by Addicon Holdings is a typical strategic choice where “time, location, people and harmony” meet perfectly. In the long run, with the successful completion of this acquisition, the domestic ICL and CRO industry landscape may be deeply reshaped.
For Addicon Holdings, it will achieve a leap from leading ICL in China to a globally competitive pharmaceutical R&D service company, with a full business layout covering “pre-clinical CRO + clinical ICL”; for the industry, this deal may trigger a wave of cross-border competition among domestic ICL companies, accelerate the industry integration process, and push local companies to advance towards a global layout and full-chain service. Under the trend of continuous growth in global pharmaceutical research and development, the collaborative combination of Addicon Holdings and Crown Biotech is expected to become a new force in the field of global pharmaceutical R&D services.