“The world can change overnight. We have to accept volatility as part of the world we live in.”
Peter DeYoung, CEO of Piramal Global Pharma, has spent 13 years with the Piramal Group, navigating the complexities of pharmaceutical manufacturing across consulting, investing, and operating roles. His engineering background and cross-continental experience position him to lead a billion-dollar pharma operation spanning CDMO services, complex hospital generics, and consumer healthcare.
In this PharmaSource podcast interview, Peter explains how Piramal competes for mindshare as pharma companies reassess their manufacturing footprints, why geographic flexibility matters more than ever, and how the company measures success through customer delight rather than satisfaction.
Competing on Geographic Flexibility, Not Just Capacity
As pharma companies work through supply chain risk, Piramal’s global network creates options some CDMOs cannot match. The company operates sites in India, the UK, the US, and Canada, allowing clients to configure their supply chains based on geographic preferences rather than accepting a single-location solution.
“We have sites in India and sites in the UK, the US, and Canada. In today’s world, its an advantage to be able to offer to a client, ‘Which geographic preferences do you have and which combination of assets will best meet your needs?’ versus saying ‘I have something in the US, or I have something in India, I hope you want it,'” Peter explains.
This approach de-risks from China without overspending. “We can handle every stage of production — from raw starting materials (RSM) and key starting materials (KSM) to intermediates, APIs, and final drug products. We can let clients map out their own supply chain and decide, ‘I want this part here, and that part there.’ Very few CDMOs can offer that level of flexibility outside of China.”
Nine of Piramal’s top 20 customers work with at least one site in India and one site in the West. More than 15 of the top 20 customers work with at least two sites. “Our most important customers, who have contributed the most to our revenue and the most to our growth, are the ones who see us as a solution partner,” Peter notes.
Leading With Two Decades of ADC Experience
In the crowded bioconjugation space, Piramal’s 20-year track record provides an edge as innovators push platform boundaries. While many CDMOs entered ADCs within the past three years, Piramal has been doing conjugation since the technology’s early days — as the first bioconjugate CDMO and the first CDMO to manufacture commercial ADC product.
“A lot of people are excited about bioconjugation. There are a lot of ways you can do bioconjugation. Often, people are trying to push the envelope, to add some angle, because ADCs are now becoming a more crowded space for the innovator,” Peter says.
The depth of experience matters when clients test new approaches. “We’ve done hundreds of clinical batches and hundreds of commercial batches. Pretty much every technology that one could conjugate, we’ve done already. And whenever a new one comes, people come to us with their tough challenges.”
Surging Demand for US-Based Manufacturing
Piramal has seen a significant uptick in RFPs for onshore offerings, particularly for drug product and drug substance, driven by policy discussions and supply chain security concerns.
“With all that’s going on in Truth Social, we’re seeing a lot of interest in onshore offerings. We’ve had a massive uptick in inquiries and RFPs,” Peter reports.
Three US sites are fielding increased demand:
- Lexington, Kentucky (sterile fill-finish with ongoing expansion)
- Sellersville, Pennsylvania (solid oral dosage and liquid/cream/ointment)
- Riverview, Michigan (drug substance, high-potent API, and linker/payload production)
The demand isn’t limited to large pharmaceutical companies. “Not everyone would be big enough to have made their own domestic investment. Maybe the big players have it. But then what about everyone else? And there’s a lot of demand in that ‘everyone else’ category.”
To meet this need, Piramal is investing $90 million to expand the Lexington and Riverview facilities. The Lexington expansion adds commercial-scale fill/finish, including two industrial-sized lyophilizers. In Michigan, they’re adding a dedicated payload-linker suite after the initial suite sold out within months.
Indian sites continue seeing strong demand from clients seeking non-China options for ex-China markets. “The math doesn’t always work to do it in the U.S. We’re seeing a lot of demand for our India sites, across drug substance and drug product.”
Measuring Success Through Customer Delight
Piramal doesn’t aim for customer satisfaction—they target customer delight. This distinction matters in an industry where the average CDMO has a negative Net Promoter Score.
“We don’t say customer satisfaction. We don’t say we met the objectives or delivered on promises. We want delight,” Peter emphasizes. The company brought in a former Disney employee to train facilities on addressing functional needs while creating emotional connections.
Piramal surveys customers at regular intervals and uses Net Promoter Score as a key metric. When a customer rates them as a promoter, sites celebrate. When customers give passive or detractor scores, Piramal initiates facilitated discussions to understand concerns and address them constructively.
Results validate the approach. Piramal’s Net Promoter Score reached 68 in the first half of this year—a 15-point increase over the previous year and far above the industry average of negative scores. A third party validates these scores annually to ensure accuracy.
“When we talk to our employees, we talk in this order: license to operate, then delivering on promises and delighting customers, and then selling new work. When that set of things occurs, then we get the overall goal of growing our top line and improving our profits,” Peter says.
Building for Long-Term Growth
Piramal’s diversified model—combining CDMO services, complex hospital generics, and consumer healthcare—provides stability through industry cycles. “The industries can go through ups and downs. By being together, we can have a lot of benefits to make sure we make the right decisions to succeed in the short, medium, and long term.”
The company aims to triple EBITDA, double revenue, and bring the debt-to-EBITDA ratio to one by 2030—what they call the “3-2-1 strategy.” Within this plan, they intend to double the CDMO business specifically.
Capital investment will be substantial. “It’ll be hundreds of millions of dollars over five years. We’re going to expect to significantly enhance capacity across many of our sites in our network.”
The client advisory board shapes these investment decisions. Piramal brings top customers together annually for two days at one of their sites, involving them in strategy discussions and gathering input on priorities.
“We involve our customers deeply in this. We have a customer advisory board where we meet with our top customers once a year for two days in person. We involve our clients in a discussion about what their priorities are,” Peter says.
Navigating Market Volatility With Measured Optimism
After a challenging funding environment from January through June, Piramal observed a modest uptick in client sentiment during the second half of the year. Recent IPOs resumed in the US market, and several large M&A deals cycled money back into the system.
Peter attributes some of the sentiment shift to the pricing arrangements Pfizer and others negotiated with the Trump administration. “When people saw where that landed, I think that did a bit of a sentiment change for the entire sector. It gave a direction of travel that narrowed the range of outcomes.”
Still, Piramal maintains realistic expectations. “Anything can change tomorrow. We might wake up to a completely different world. We have to learn to live with volatility and accept that it’s part of the environment we’re in.”
