SHL Medical started out in 1989 making medical devices from a single factory in Taiwan. Now the firm is poised to capture a chunk of the booming market for weight loss drugs.of weight loss drugs took the markets by storm last year, spurring huge stock gains for drugmakers like Novo Nordisk, which makes Wegovy and Ozempic.
"They're single-use devices that have the drug in here, you take off the cap and you inject yourself," says Ulrich Fässler, SHL Medical’s CEO, demonstrating one of the firm’s products—a sleek, cylindrical injector called “Molly” that resembles a whiteboard marker—in a video call from his office in Zug, Switzerland. . “When Roger started in the early 90s, he thought that single-use autoinjectors could transform the administration of drugs. It took 30 years, but it did.
“We made home administration actually possible,” says Fässler, who joined the company in 2010 and led the company’s operations in Taiwan. “That was the starting point of this industry taking off.” Fässler took over as CEO in January 2018, with Samuelsson staying on as the firm’s majority shareholder. That same year, the firm completed a new, 680,000-square-foot factory in Taiwan and moved its headquarters to Switzerland. Two years later, EQT acquired a 31% stake from Samuelsson and two smaller investors who cashed out in the transaction, paying more than $400 million according to filings in Luxembourg.
The total revenues for drug delivery systems—including autoinjectors, pens and inhalers—was estimated to be $2.1 billion at the end of 2022 and is expected to grow 10% each year to $3.2 billion by 2027, according to an analysis by publicly traded Stevanato Group. Drugs like Ozempic will drive that growth even higher. In 2023, 61% of all therapies newly approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required injectors, up from 46% in 2014.
Despite the competition, there’s more than enough business to go around for SHL Medical."It's not a concern at all," says Aschenbrenner, pointing to the Catalent acquisition."We have a very good partnership with Novo and it's very important that the supply chain works.”