January 11, 2016
By Mark Terry, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Wilmington, Mass.-based Charles River Laboratories indicated recently that it plans to hire up to 300 people in Massachusetts this year. The new staffers will be hired to work in its drug safety laboratory in Shrewsbury, which has recently reopened.
Charles River Laboratories (CRL) is an early-phase contract research organization (CRO). It’s CRO services for drug discovery are fairly new, but parallels the company’s original push into outsourcing toxicology services starting in 2000.
CRL employs 8,500 people, 1,000 in Massachusetts. Last week, the company announced that it is acquiring WIL Research for about $585 million in cash. WIL Research provides safety assessment and contract development and manufacturing (CDMO) services to biopharma, agricultural and industrial chemical companies. This acquisition strengthens CRL’s CRO activities worldwide. It also adds 1,400 employees to the company.
“In addition to meeting our disciplined acquisition criteria, WIL Research is an exceptional strategic fit for Charles River because it incorporates the key attributes we require in an acquisition: high-quality services, scientific expertise, complementary capabilities, and access to growing end markets,” said James Foster, CRL’s chairman, president and chief executive officer, in a statement. “The acquisition will also expand our geographic footprint, particularly in continental Europe, providing needed capacity to meet current and future demand and enabling Charles River to provide a broader range of services proximate to our global clients.”
CRL plans to expand into Massachusetts over the next three to five years. “Clearly, Cambridge and Boston is the center of biomedical research for the world,” said Foster to Boston Business Journal. “It makes sense we’ll continue to invest in facilities and people in this neck of the woods.”
Foster indicates that CRL will be busy integrating WIL Research into its operations this year, but that it positions the company for more merger-and-acquisition activities in the future. “We’re excited about this,” Foster told Boston Business Journal. “This is a small entrée, but it’s a very large, highly fragmented market, where there is probably some opportunity to do some merger and acquisition. … We want to close this deal and make the acquisition sing before we talk too much about that … but directionally it’s an area we could pursue and build a meaningfully large business through additional merger and acquisition.”
Although the company’s 2015 financials have not been released yet, on Nov. 4, 2015, it released its third quarter financials. Revenue for the quarter was $349.5 million, an increase of 6.7 percent from $327.6 million in the same quarter in 2014. In that quarter, the company also announced it had repurchased about 242,000 shares for a total of $17.9 million.
Charles River Laboratories has been pretty volatile the last year. Shares traded on March 19, 2015 for $77.42, dropped to $69.16 on April 30, and rose back to $77.62 on July 31. Shares then dropped again to $61.59 on Sept. 28, and back to a high of $80.54 on Dec. 30. Shares are currently trading for $77.27.
