How to Sell More Profitably

 There are only three ways to increase profitability – sell more products, increase prices, reduce costs. Almost every company has in its DNA the desire to sell more products. Almost every company is diligent in keeping a control of its costs.

The big weakness for most companies is understanding how the manipulation of its prices can be used to improve profitability. This is a very powerful weapon in selling more profitably. A 1% increase in price for most companies goes straight on the bottom line and adds around 8% to operating profits. Find out more in the handy infographic below.

https://bit.ly/3NhCJa9

KPI Dashboards (Part 1)

 

https://bit.ly/3rO5kK8

Q: What do you consider GOOD and GREAT retention?

"Great retention is THE scalable way to grow a product. It's the best indicator of product-market fit, it is the most important factor in a user’s lifetime value, and high retention drives all of the best acquisition strategies. It's growth's equivalent of the triple-word-score."

— Casey Winters

Although retention is widely considered to be the most important metric to get right when building (and investing in) a business, it’s also one of the least understood. Why? Because unless you’re a growth expert or an experienced investor, you’re often relying on anecdotes, dated blog posts, and misguided benchmarks. I ran into this problem myself many times when working with startups.

So when Casey Winters (former head of growth at Pinterest, GrubHub, and now CPO at Eventbrite) brought up this question in a conversation we were having, we decided to take the opportunity to do some new research. Together, we reached out to twenty of the most experienced growth practitioners we knew and asked them two simple questions:

1. What do you consider GOOD and GREAT user retention (at 6 months)?
2. What do you consider GOOD and GREAT net revenue retention (at 12 months)?

Taking these insights and combining them with available public data, we’ve come up with a set of concrete recommendations for GOOD and GREAT retention across most types of businesses. Below you’ll find a visual summary of these conclusions, along with detailed recommendations from each of the experts, and public comps from many of today’s biggest companies.

As a companion to this post, Casey also published an essay delving into ways to increase retention, amongst other topics, which you should definitely check out.

Without further ado, let’s dive in.

What is GOOD and GREAT retention?

GOOD and GREAT User Retention

• Consumer Social: ~25% is GOOD, ~45% is GREAT
• Consumer Transactional: ~30% is GOOD, ~50% is GREAT
• Consumer SaaS: ~40% is GOOD, ~70% is GREAT
• SMB / Mid-Market SaaS: ~60% is GOOD, ~80% is GREAT
• Enterprise SaaS: ~70% is GOOD, ~90% is GREAT

GOOD and GREAT Net Revenue Retention

• Consumer SaaS: ~55% is GOOD, ~80% is GREAT
• Bottom-Up SaaS: ~100% is GOOD, ~120% is GREAT
• Land and Expand VSB SaaS: ~80% is GOOD, ~100% is GREAT
• Land and Expand SMB / Mid-Market SaaS: ~90% is GOOD, ~110% is GREAT
• Enterprise SaaS: ~110% is GOOD, ~130% is GREAT

Here’s a handy visual guide, which links to a high-res PDF:

Big thank you to the experts

Adam Fishman (Patreon, Imperfect Foods), Andrew Chen (Uber, a16z), Andy Johns (Twitter, Facebook, Wealthfront), Brian Balfour (Reforge), Brian Rothenberg (Eventbrite, TaskRabbit), ChenLi Wang (Dropbox), Dan Hockenmaier (Thumbtack), Elena Verna (SurveyMonkey, Miro), Fareed Mosavat (Slack), Jamie Quint (Notion, Reddit), Jeff Chang (Pinterest), Julie Zhou (Hipmunk, Yik Yak, AdRoll), Kevin Kwok (Greylock), Li Jin (a16z), Merci Grace (Slack), Mike Duboe (Stitch Fix, Greylock), Naomi Ionita (Evernote, Menlo Ventures), Nick Soman (Gusto, Decent), Sarah Guo (Greylock), Shaun Clowes (Atlassian, MuleSoft), and Yuriy Timen (Grammarly). And of course, my incredible partner on this research, Casey Winters.

Disclaimer: Why it may be OK for your retention to be low

To some, these retention benchmarks will seem high. This is because the bar to build a massively successful business is high. Frankly, it’s why most startups fail. However, although retention is an important metric to get right, it doesn’t live in vacuum. There are cases where a lower retention rate is OK:

1. You’re just starting out: Don’t despair if you don’t see this level of retention immediately. Use these benchmarks a guide to prioritize between retention vs. acquisition, and read Casey’s post for three ways to approach increasing retention. But just know, startups rarely increase retention significantly.
2. You have low CAC and marginal costs: Growth is a balancing act between CAC, retention, and unit economics. If you can acquire new users cheaply (e.g. SEO, WOM, or virality), you can afford to lose more users. This thread by Dan Hockenmaier explains why low retention for businesses like Shopify and Twitter is OK.
3. You’re not building a venture-scale business: These benchmarks are coming from people who helped build iconic, massively scalable, businesses. This level of retention is not required for product/market fit, or to build a sustainable business. Though the upside will be limited, a flat retention curve that drives a scalable acquisition strategy is enough to keep your business alive.

Ultimately, what matters is that your retention supports sustained growth.

— Fareed Mosavat

Now, let’s get into the details.

1. What is good User Retention?

Let’s define user retention as the % of users who signed up and are still active (i.e. using the product, making a purchase, posting a photo) six months later.

Consumer Social: ~25% is GOOD, ~45% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram that are free to use and are generally supported by advertising. The denominator in this category are registered users.

Expert recommendations

• Jeff Chang: Over 25% is GOOD, over 40% is GREAT
• Casey Winters: Over 25% is GOOD, over 45% is GREAT
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 25% is GOOD, over 50% is GREAT
• Jamie Quint: Over 30% is GOOD, over 40% is GREAT
• ChenLi Wang: Over 30% is GOOD, over 50% is GREAT
• Julie Zhou: Over 30% is GOOD, over 60% is GREAT
• Kevin Kwok: Over 30% is GOOD, over 60% is GREAT
• Andrew Chen: Over 50% is GOOD, over 75% is GREAT

Public comps

• Facebook: 60 - 70% 6-month user retention
• Instagram: 50 - 60% 6-month user retention
• Snapchat: 33% 3-month user retention, 30% 24-month (source, source)
• Twitter: 31% 3-month user retention, 22% 24-month (source, source)

Consumer Transactional: ~30% is GOOD, ~50% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Airbnb, Lyft, and TurboTax that are generally supported by one-off purchases. The denominator in this category are users who have made at least one transaction.

Expert recommendations

• Casey Winters: Over 15% is GOOD, over 35% is GREAT
• Kevin Kwok: Over 30% is GOOD, over 50% is GREAT
• Dan Hockenmaier: Over 30% is GOOD, over 50% is GREAT
• Li Jin: Over 30% is GOOD, over 50% is GREAT
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 30% is GOOD, over 60% is GREAT
• ChenLi Wang: Over 30% is GOOD, over 70% is GREAT

Public comps

• TurboTax: 77% 12-month customer retention (source)
• Lyft: 22% 12-month customer retention (source)

Consumer SaaS: ~40% is GOOD, ~70% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu that sell a monthly/yearly subscription to consumers. The denominator in this category are users who have started a paid subscription.

Expert recommendations

• Dan Hockenmaier: Over 40% is GOOD, over 60% is GREAT
• Adam Fishman: Over 40% is GOOD, over 70% is GREAT
• Jeff Chang: Over 50% is GOOD, over 70% is GREAT
• Mike Duboe: Over 50% is GOOD, over 70% is GREAT
• Elena Verna: Over 70% is GOOD, over 80% is GREAT

Public comps

• Amazon Prime: 93% 12-month customer retention (source)
• Dropbox: ~80% 12-month customer retention
• Spotify: 72% 6-month customer retention (source, source)
• Netflix: 66% 12-month customer retention (source)
• Hulu: 53% 12-month customer retention (source)

SMB / Mid-Market SaaS: ~60% is GOOD, ~80% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Asana, Slack, and Atlassian that primarily sell a subscription product to companies roughly 100-1000 employees. The denominator in this category are companies who have started a paid subscription.

Expert recommendations

• Yuriy Timen: Over 60% is GOOD, over 80% is GREAT
• Mike Duboe: Over 60% is GOOD, 80% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 70% is GOOD, over 80% is GREAT
• Fareed Mosavat: Over 70% is GOOD, over 85% is GREAT
• ChenLi Wang: Over 70% is GOOD, over 85% is GREAT
• Andy Johns: Over 70% is GOOD, 90% is GREAT
• Dan Hockenmaier: Over 70% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT
• Merci Grace: Over 80% is GOOD, 90% is GREAT

Public companies

• Atlassian: 98% 12-month customer retention (source)
• Slack: 90-95% 12-month customer retention (source, source)
• QuickBooks: 79% 12-month customer retention (source)

Enterprise SaaS: ~75% is GOOD, ~90% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Salesforce, Workday, and ADP that primarily sell a subscription product to large enterprise companies (i.e. over 1000 employees).

Expert recommendations

• Andy Johns: Over 70% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT 
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 75% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT
• Jeff Chang: Over 80% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 85% is GOOD, over 95% is GREAT
• Nick Soman: Over 85% is GOOD, over 95% is GREAT
• Shaun Clowes: Over 85% is GOOD, over 95% is GREAT

Public comps

• Workday: 95% 12-month customer retention (source)
• Salesforce: 90% 12-month customer retention (source)
• ADP: 90%+ 12-month customer retention (source)

What is good Net Revenue Retention?

Let’s define Net Revenue Retention as a company’s monthly recurring revenue (MRR) one year ago divided into the current month’s MRR from that same group of customers. Essentially, how much revenue are you driving from one cohort of customers over time?

You’ll notice this section has slightly different categories from previous section. This is because of the way the customers a business sells to impacts revenue retention (unlike user retention). For example, the network effects in Bottom-Up SaaS often drive up retention, while involuntary churn of Very Small business (VSB) is common because many go out of business, and Land and Expand models increases revenue per user in ways that can make up for high user churn.

Now, let’s look at what good and great net revenue retention looks like for each type of business.

Consumer SaaS: ~55% is GOOD, ~80% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Netflix, Spotify, and Hulu that sell a monthly/yearly subscription to consumers. The denominator in this category are users who have started a paid subscription.

Expert recommendations

• Casey Winters: Over 50% is GOOD, over 70% is GREAT
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 55% is GOOD, over 75% is GREAT
• Yuriy Timen: Over 60% is GOOD, over 80% is GREAT
• Dan Hockenmaier: Over 65% is GOOD, over 75% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 70% is GOOD, over 80% is GREAT
• Andy Johns: Over 70% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT
• Mike Duboe: Over 70% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT

Bottom-Up SaaS: ~100% is GOOD, ~120% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Slack, Figma, and Zoom that offer a self-serve prosumer subscription product to individual contributors inside of a company.

Expert recommendations

• Jeff Chang: Over 100% is GOOD, over 110% is GREAT
• Brian Balfour: Over 100% is GOOD, over 120% is GREAT
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 100% is GOOD, over 120% is GREAT
• Fareed Mosavat: Over 110% is GOOD, over 130% is GREAT
• Naomi Ionita: Over 110% is GOOD, over 130% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 110% is GOOD, over 130% is GREAT
• Jamie Quint: Over 120% is GOOD, over 140% is GREAT
• Merci Grace: Over 120% is GOOD, over 140% is GREAT

Public comps

• Twilio: 140-170% (source, source, source)
• Zoom: 140% (source)
• Slack: 135 - 155% (source, source)
• PagerDuty: 139% (source)
• Datadog: 130% (source)
• New Relic: 115% (source)
• Dropbox: ~100% (source)

Land and Expand VSB SaaS: ~80% is GOOD, ~100% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Gusto that sell a subscription service to early-stage companies, roughly <100 employees.

Expert recommendations

• Brian Balfour: Over 80% is GOOD, over 90% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 85% is GOOD, over 105% is GREAT
• Fareed Mosavat: Over 90% is GOOD, over 110% is GREAT

Land and Expand SMB / Mid-Market SaaS: ~90% is GOOD, ~110% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Atlassian, Box, and ZenDesk that sell a subscription service to companies with roughly 100 - 1000 employees.

Expert recommendations

• Mike Duboe: 85% is GOOD, 110% is GREAT
• Sarah Guo: Over 90% is GOOD, over 110% is GREAT
• Brian Balfour: Over 100% is GOOD, over 120% is GREAT
• Brian Rothenberg: Over 100% is GOOD, over 120% is GREAT
• Adam Fishman: Over 100% is GOOD, over 125% is GREAT

Public comps

• Atlassian: 100-148% (source)
• Box: 130% (source)
• ZenDesk: 123% (source)
• SendGrid: 116% (source)

Enterprise SaaS: ~110% is GOOD, ~130% is GREAT

This includes companies such as Salesforce, Workday, and ADP that primarily sell a subscription product to large enterprise companies, roughly over 1000 employees.

Expert recommendations

• Jeff Chang: Over 110% is GOOD, over 120% is GREAT
• Naomi Ionita: Over 120% is GOOD, over 140% is GREAT

Public comps

• Alteryx: 135% (source)
• Fastly: 130% (source)
• Okta: 124% (source)
• Anaplan: 124% (source)
• Workday: 100%+ (source)
• ServiceNow: 97% (source)

In summary

If you take nothing else away from this post, it should be that retention matters. A lot. No other metric is as singularly telling of whether your business will thrive or die. And so, the better you understand what good retention looks like for your business, the better shot you have at the former. We hope this research proves useful to you whether you’re building, investing, or just curious.

Please ping me if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post. And don’t forget to go read Casey’s companion post.

https://bit.ly/34LjZvt

What Is Good Retention: An Exhaustive Benchmark Study with Lenny Rachitsky

Hi, I'm Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite

At the end of 2019, I presented Eventbrite’s product plans to the board for 2020. These plans included a lot of the goals you likely have in your company: improvements in acquisition, activation, and retention. One of our board members asked: “I understand these goals for the year. But long term, how high could we push this retention number? What would great retention be for Eventbrite?”

I actually didn’t have a great answer. Soon after, I was chatting with Lenny Rachitsky, and we decided to embark on a holistic study across the industry to ask “what is great retention?” across business models, customer types, etc. Lenny surveyed a lot of the top practitioners in the industry across a variety of companies, and we’re happy to share the results here. You can see the raw data below, but I recommend reading Lenny’s analysis here. Done? Good.

Why is retention so damn important?
Why are Lenny and I spending so much time researching retention? Because it is the single most important factor in product success. Retention is not only the primary measure of product value and product/market fit for most businesses; it is also the biggest driver of monetization and acquisition as well.

We typically think of monetization as the lifetime value formula, which is how long a user is active along with revenue per active user. Retention has the most impact on how many users are active and lengthens the amount of time they are active. For acquisition, retention is the enabler of the best acquisition strategies. For virality or word of mouth, for example, one of the key factors in any virality formula is how many people can talk about or share your product. The more retained users, the more potential sharers. For content, the more retained users, the more content, the more that content be shared or discovered to attract more users. For paid acquisition or sales, the more retained users, the higher lifetime value, the more you can spend on paid acquisition or sales and still have a comfortable payback period. Retention really is growth’s triple word score.

What are effective ways to increase retention?
Okay, so you understand retention is important and want to improve it. What do you do? Well, at a high level, there are three types of efforts you can pursue to increase retention:

1. Make the product more valuable: Every product is a bundle of features, and your product may be missing features that get more marginal users to retain better. This is a journey for feature/product fit.
2. Connect users better to the value of the product that already exists: This is the purpose of a growth team leveraging tactics like onboarding, emails and notifications, and reducing friction in the product where it’s too complex and adding friction when it’s required to connect people to the value.
3. Create a new product: Struggling to retain users at all? You likely don’t have product/market fit and may need to pivot to a new product.

We discuss these strategies in a lot more depth in the upcoming Product Strategy program coming soon from Reforge, and if you really want a deep dive on retention, we build the Retention & Engagement deep dive.

Why does retention differ so much across categories?
One question you might be asking yourself is why does retention differ so much by different categories? This was the impetus for the initial research, and why I couldn’t give a great answer to our board. Every company has a bunch of different factors that impact retention:

• Customer type: For example, small businesses fail at a much higher rate than enterprise businesses, so businesses that target small businesses will almost always have lower retention.* This does not make them inferior businesses! They also have many more customers they can acquire.
• Customer variability: Products that have many different types of customers will typically have lower retention than products that hone in on one type of customer very well.
• Revenue model: How much money you ask from customers and how can play a big role in retention. For example, a customer may be more likely to retain for a product they marginally like if it costs $30 vs. $300,000. A product that expands revenue per user over time can have lower retention than ones that have a fixed price.
• Natural frequency: Many products have different natural frequencies. For example, you may only look for a place to live once every few years (like my time at Apartments.com), but you look for something to eat multiple times of day (like my time at Grubhub).
• Acquisition strategy: The way a company acquires users affects its retention. A wide spread approach to new users may retain worse than carefully targeting users to bring to your product.
• Network effects: Network effects may drive retention rates up more over time vs. businesses that do not have these effects. For example, all of your friends on Facebook or all of your co-workers on Slack makes it hard to churn from either product whereas churning from Calm or Grammarly is entirely up to you.

* In those businesses, the business failing and churning as a result is called “involuntary churn”, though that can also mean a payment method not working for someone who wants to retain in other models.

BONUS: Why are Casey’s benchmarks for consumer transactional businesses lower than others?

For the demand side of transactional businesses, where the retention graph flattens is more important to me than the six month retention rate. And unlike other models, these businesses can take longer than six months to have their graphs flatten. Also, for marketplaces, one of the two common models along with ecommerce in this category, a healthy demand side retention rate is very dependent on what supply side retention looks like and acquisition costs. For example, since Uber and Lyft have to spend so much time and money acquiring drivers due to a low retention rate, in order for their model to work, demand side retention either has to be high or demand side acquisition has to be low cost. For a business where supply side retention is high and acquisition costs are low, demand side retention can be lower, and the company can still be very successful. Etsy and Wag I imagine fit more into this model.

https://bit.ly/2G6OOjL

What’s driving the rapid growth of the top 20 biopharma companies in the world?

I’ve been remarking for some time now that the whole biopharma sector globally has grown enormously over the past few years. And thanks to the investment bankers at Torreya I can add a few numbers to put that into perspective, along with the booming role that China has played and is likely to continue to play over the next generation.

One of the charts that really leaped out at me was a look at the market valuations of the top 20 companies. In the past 6 years, says Torreya’s new report out on the industry, those valuations have doubled in size, growing from about $1.45 trillion to very close to $3 trillion.

The standouts are Celgene, up 351%, and J&J, which grew by $204 billion to today’s $380 billion (up about 1% since Torreya gathered the numbers). That rise alone is getting into the same ballpark as all of Roche’s $232 billion. And lets keep in mind that the swelling valuations among the top 20 biopharmas have been tracking rapidly growing stock indexes as well.

This is occurring during a time in which most governments — outside the US — are more likely than ever to get aggressive about containing the cost of drugs, which helps explain why the 12 big governments in Europe spend 1.2% of GDP on drugs, compared to 2.03% in the US, where cost controls have not been put in place by the government. The US, by the way, is just a little ahead of Japan on that score, which registers 1.93% of GDP going to pharmaceuticals.

Rare diseases and oncology will remain a central focus in R&D. Torreya carved out the top 20 pure-play rare disease companies in the world and calculated they have a market value of $315 billion — which gets back to that J&J comparison to put it into perspective.

If you focus on the value of companies that spotlight rare forms of cancer, there’s another $193 billion. So now you’re talking around a half trillion dollars for the total.

China, meanwhile, has seen its Pharma sector boom. Over just the last 18 months, the value of the top 20 pharma companies in China grew from $450 billion to $534 billion — up 19%. And Torreya believes this is not a bubble. Over the next 50 years they expect the pharma sector in China will quadruple in size, while the US will double and major European markets will be under the 2X level.

The US will account for 33% of pharma revenue this year, with China weighing in at 10% and Western Europe at 22%. In 2060, Torreya’s analysts believe that China will grow to 18%, edging out Western Europe at 17% though still well behind the US share of 30%.

In many respects, this century should mark China’s arrival as one of the Big 3 biopharma markets. For now, though, it remains one of the most poorly understood markets in the world.

Biologics in general, and rare disease biologics in particular, will continue to be standouts for the growth companies in the industry, Torreya figures. RNA tech, gene therapies and gene editing will drive future growth while cell therapies become much more routine. And new innovations in pharma manufacturing will create more opportunities at a time that miniature implantable devices help automate the regular use of therapeutics.

2017 Global Market Capitalization Leaderboard

Top 10 Global CROs 2017

The global contract research market is growing at a strong rate owing to increasing patent expiration and declining R&D productivity. Furthermore, increasing costs of new product development and revenue loss due to generics have resulted in high demand for contract researching of new biologics and compounds. The global CRO market is highly consolidated with the combined market share of the top-10 companies in this market estimated to be around 80% in 2016. This consolidation can be attributed to the highly stringent nature of the market with requirements of high capital investment. The leaders in this market include a mix of public-listed and privately held organizations.

A ranking system was developed for the top-10 global clinical research organizations. A score statistic was developed to determine the rank of each organization. Revenues, scope of service portfolio, net income and expenses ratios were the key input criteria used to calculate the score statistic for and every organization was assigned a score for each of these key input criteria. Different weights were assigned to each rank. A weighted sum of the scores was used to arrive at the final score statistic for each organization. The final score statistic represents the financial health, competitive advantage, and activity status of each organization in the clinical trials domain.

Ranking of Top-10 Global CRO

Note: *Estimated, **2015, Y= present

Sources: Annual reports and SEC filings.

QUINTILES IMS HOLDINGS, INC. 

Quintiles recorded its revenues at USD 7.8 billion, an increase by nearly 20% from previous year. The company is ranked first among the top CROs across the globe owing to its wide portfolio of clinical research and post-clinical research services. Formed through the merger of Quintiles and IMS Health, QuintilesIMS’s over 50,000 employees conduct operations in more than 100 countries and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

LABORATORY CORPORATION OF AMERICA HOLDINGS

The company became the second largest player in the ranking post its acquisition of Covance in 2015. The Company reports its business in two segments, LabCorp Diagnostics (LCD) and Covance Drug Development (CDD). Covance Drug Development is a provider of end-to-end drug development services from early-stage research to regulatory approval and beyond. In 2016, LCD and CDD contributed 69.9% and 30.1%, respectively, of net revenues to the Company.

PAREXEL International Corporation

The company is ranked third in the list and has a second largest service portfolio. The company provides a broad range of expertise in clinical research, clinical logistics, medical communications, consulting, commercialization and advanced technology products and services to the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical device industries.

Pharmaceutical Product Development, LLC

PPD is a privately held organization with a strong portfolio of integrated drug development, laboratory and lifecycle management services including clinical, pre-clinical, post-clinical, and commercialisation services. The company has 89 offices in 47 countries with more than 19,000 employees.

INC RESEARCH HOLDINGS, INC.

The company is focused primarily on Phase I to Phase IV clinical development services for the biopharmaceutical and medical device industries. The company has approximately 6,800 employees in 50 countries across six continents. The company offers a variety of clinical development services, including global studies, clinical monitoring, investigator recruitment, patient recruitment, data management, specialized consulting services, scientific exploratory medicine amongst others.

PRA Health Sciences, Inc.

The company provides clinical trial expertise using clinical development platform includes approximately 70 offices across North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, South Africa, Australia and the Middle East and over 13,000 employees worldwide. The company ranked seventh in the list, owing to one of the highest expense ratios and low income ratios.

ICON PUBLIC LIMITED COMPANY

The Ireland based company specialize in the strategic development, management and analysis of programs that support all stages of the clinical development process - from compound selection to Phase I-IV clinical studies. Net revenues for the company increase 5.8%, from 2015 to 2016 owing to continued organic growth and acquisition of ClinicalRM in 2016.

WUXI PHARMATECH (CAYMAN) INC

The Chinese company is a contract researcher for most of the largest pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies and many smaller companies. It portfolio includes small molecule R&D and manufacturing, biologics R&D and manufacturing, cell therapy and gene therapy R&D and manufacturing, medical device testing, and molecular testing and genomics. The company’s platform is enabling nearly 3,000 innovative collaborators from more than 30 countries to bring innovative healthcare products.

CHARLES RIVER LABORATORIES INTERNATIONAL, INC.

The company has a diverse portfolio of discovery and safety assessment services, both Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) and non-GLP, to support target identification and drug development model. The company has three reporting segments: Research Models and Services (RMS), Discovery and Safety Assessment (DSA), and Manufacturing Support (Manufacturing).

Advent International

Advent, a private equity firm, acquired inVentiv Health in 2016. The company provides comprehensive and integrated clinical and commercial outsourcing services to the biopharmaceutical industry. The company has more than 15,000 healthcare professionals servicing clients in 90 countries.

 Watch the summary video

Sources: Annual reports and SEC filings.

Luca Dezzani, MD