tech0200, I could think of a few reasons.
For starters CDMO, since TCLN/PPHM was involved in lab activities. They have seen and been the LAB and the LAB's customer side. They have built up expertise and now have even in-house consultancy. I think that we may thank S. King for starting that up (isolated from all things why some which him to hell).
CDMO won many awards for their labs. I think there was a year there were 5 or 6 at once. This shows expertise.
CDMO has that FDA 'zero remarks' status and track record that they advertise well. It is not easy to pass all FDA initial and recurrent checks with excellence.
They hired specialists, such as for purification, and invested in dependencies such as distilled water. That gave them more control over their business, hence flexibility. At their scale they can do such things.
They were at a scale were it was easy for them to go 'all-in' on reusable reactors, forward-only processes, etc while, from a video posted on here (with a panel of CDMO and 3 other competitors) we've seen that the others have difficulty to achieve that (due to history & cost). And we cannot say that Lonza and Catalent don't have the means! (forgot who the 3rd one was).
Further more CDMO can count on a golden customer, one who's customers need to come to CDMO. That is HALO. They know that even if they would invest in over capacity HALO's customers will pick it in. That is even more certain after HALO's lasts reports. That makes it easier to grow. The big guys cannot or do not want to grow with small labs, they need scale due to their overhead. So they must invest big money, as does Lonza in their huge Swiss expansion. BUT...they expand to take & grow well know business because they need the margins of routine, business as usual processes.
So, in answer to your question I would say that for a new player it is difficult to start that up and for the big players they have history gluing at them. Those big players may see their margins melt over such needed investments for a to fast transitions, while CDMO understands that grabbing the business and keeping it is key. If you give a good service, not even the best, the cost to move to another manufacturer is to high and the reward to small.
You know Warren B invested in donuts, coffee, hamburgers and drinks when the companies that started that where small. They became giants. The same is for the new bio-pharma. Many companies will have research and break throughs but without small size high-tech labs like CDMO they have no place to go. In competition with a BP the Lonza's and Catalent will always prioritize their capacity to BP.
I think all that is one more reason why CDMO has near 120% Inst. Inv. It is also the reason why we go down on more BUY volume that SELL volume as reported by cheynew in the past. It is also the reason why we can go down 1$ on 200 shares and up 10 cent on 500.000 shares. It is all connected.
AIMO
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