India’s next CDMO opportunity isn’t just pharma
| AUTHOR | Shambhavi Naik |
| DATE | November 2, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | Advanced Biology Bioeconomy |
India has the feedstock, the fermentation expertise and the contract-manufacturing playbook to supply the world’s bio-based products
India’s contract-manufacturing story is usually told through its role as the pharmacy of the world. So it is no surprise that industry leaders expect the next phase of growth for Indian contract development and manufacturing organisations (CDMOs) to come from biologics, GLP-1 peptides, sterile injectables and drug-device combinations. India holds only 2–3 per cent of a global CDMO market that by most estimates exceeds $140 billion, and McKinsey projects that its share of outsourced CDMO work could rise to 8–10 per cent by 2033.
That ambition is right. But a focus on pharma alone misses a larger opportunity. The most acute shortage in biomanufacturing today is not in drugs. It is in industrial fermentation: the tanks, engineered microbes and process know-how that make food proteins, enzymes, specialty chemicals and materials. In its 2020 report on the “Bio Revolution”, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that as much as 60 per cent of the physical inputs to the global economy could, in principle, be produced biologically, with a direct economic impact of $2–4 trillion a year over the following one to two decades.
The global market for fermentation products was estimated at about $104 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $197 billion by 2034. Much of this growth comes from precision fermentation, in which microbes are engineered to produce a single target molecule such as a dairy protein or a specialty lipid. As governments and global brands commit to bio-based content and lower-carbon inputs, they are creating demand that today’s installed capacity cannot meet. Whoever builds that capacity will capture much of the value biotechnology creates.
Venture investment in the segment has run into billions of dollars over the past decade, yet the capacity to scale these products has not kept pace. When Synonym Bio analysed 150 fermentation facilities across more than 30 countries in 2023, it found that only about 15 per cent offered demonstration-scale capacity and 16 per cent commercial-scale capacity. The result is a structural mismatch: companies that have validated their biology in the laboratory often cannot find the capacity to commercialise it. Contract manufacturers that can bridge this gap are well placed to capture a significant share of the value the sector generates.
The existing capacity is also highly concentrated. By widely cited industry estimates, China holds about 70 per cent of global fermentation capacity, built over decades of producing amino acids, organic acids, vitamins and antibiotics. As margins in pharmaceutical fermentation narrow, several large Chinese producers have begun redirecting capacity towards mycoprotein, yeast proteins and precision-fermented fats.
Other countries have spotted the opening, treating fermentation capacity as a strategic infrastructure. In October 2025, the Abu Dhabi Investment Office partnered with the precision-fermentation firms Vivici and The Every Company to explore a shared, multi- tenant facility of about four million litres. The plant is meant to anchor a regional protein-fermentation ecosystem, and Abu Dhabi is developing a streamlined regulatory framework for novel foods alongside it. Saudi Arabia’s NEOM Investment Fund has signed a similar exploratory agreement with Liberation Bioindustries, and Singapore already hosts ScaleUp Bio, a dedicated precision-fermentation CDMO backed by ADM and a Singapore state investor.
India has an emerging industrial-fermentation industry of its own. Laurus Bio, the biotechnology subsidiary of Laurus Labs, offers microbial precision fermentation as a contract service, from strain engineering to production runs of up to 45,000 litres. Symbiotec Pharmalab has signed a contract to manufacture an alternative protein for a US company. Bengaluru-based Fermbox Bio, which develops fermentation processes for enzymes, colours,lipids and other bio-based products, is placing up to ₹60 crore of fermentation equipment at Natural Biogenex’s facility under a contract-manufacturing partnership.
These are meaningful developments, but they also show the scale of the gap. On publicly reported figures, the single facility proposed in Abu Dhabi would be roughly three times the combined fermentation capacity of Laurus Bio and Symbiotec, including their near-term expansion plans. Much of India’s existing capacity is also tied to pharmaceuticals. Industrial biomanufacturing still looks like an extension of the pharma base rather than a sector with its own scale, financing and regulatory architecture.
The case for building the sector rests on several factors. The first is supply-chain resilience. Indian industry itself relies heavily on Chinese imports of vitamins, amino acids and enzymes, a vulnerability comparable to the dependence on imported active pharmaceutical ingredients that prompted the production-linked incentive schemes. The second is feedstock: India has abundant fermentable sugars in sugarcane, molasses and agricultural residues. The third is infrastructure and skills. The ethanol-blending programme has created distillery capacity and a trained fermentation workforce, and the country has long experience in antibiotic and enzyme fermentation and a large pool of chemical engineers. The fourth is a growing global demand for bio-based products and current geopolitics that may favour Indian companies as an alternative to China.
The BioE3 policy, approved in 2024, provides a starting point through a national network of 21 biofoundries and biomanufacturing hubs. These facilities, however, operate largely at pilot and pre-commercial scale. The binding constraint now is the move from pilot to commercial production, and policy attention needs to shift accordingly.
India built its pharma CDMO business by becoming the world’s trusted manufacturer. The same playbook applies to the bioeconomy, but the window is narrower. China is already pivoting, and global buyers are choosing their suppliers now. India should not let the industrial CDMO story be written as someone else’s: the time to expand India’s CDMO landscape is right now.