Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide tender clears its bar as Songdo keeps booking biologics work

Samsung Biologics is still a biologics shop on paper, but the Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide takeover has now cleared its main hurdle. Holders of 87.88% of the Swiss peptide maker's shares accepted the cash offer by October 12, while the Korean group keeps adding long contracts at home, including a 350.8 billion won order from an unnamed European drugmaker.

The tender offer result in numbers

The offer was made through Samsung Peptide AG, a direct subsidiary set up for the purpose. According to the final interim count PolyPeptide published on October 16, 2026, holders tendered 29,014,418 PolyPeptide shares by the close of the main offer period at 4 p.m. Swiss time on October 12. That equals 87.59% of the issued share capital and 87.88% of the shares the tender offer covers. Counting parties acting in concert, participation reached 87.92%. The minimum acceptance level written into the terms was two thirds of the shares, so the bar was passed with a wide margin. For the Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide deal, Samsung Peptide declared the offer successful, but only subject to conditions that are still open, and it has not yet paid for a single share.

Those open conditions are mostly about permission and governance. Merger control and foreign direct investment clearances are still needed in certain jurisdictions, which the release does not name. PolyPeptide's articles also carry transfer restrictions and voting limits that must be removed, and Samsung's nominees must be elected to the board at an extraordinary general meeting called for October 26. An additional acceptance period runs from October 19 to October 30 for holders who stayed out. Settlement had been planned for November 13 but is now expected to slip, with completion seen toward the end of 2026 or in the first quarter of 2027. After that, Samsung intends to squeeze out the remaining minority and seek a delisting from SIX Swiss Exchange.

What a peptide CDMO adds to an antibody maker

Samsung Biologics announced the bid on July 20, 2026. It offered CHF 44.31 per share in cash, which it said was a 40% premium to the undisturbed closing price of CHF 31.65 on April 10 and valued the equity at about CHF 1.46 billion. PolyPeptide's board recommended the offer, and its largest shareholder, holding about 55.65%, agreed in advance to tender all its shares. For the Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide bid, that undertaking alone covered most of the distance to the two thirds threshold, which is why the result carried little suspense. Chairman and chief executive John Rim said at the time that "this acquisition reinforces our long-term growth strategy", and the company framed the purchase as a move beyond antibodies and antibody drug conjugates into peptide medicines.

Settlement had been planned for November 13 but is now expected to slip, with completion seen toward the end of 2026 or in the first quarter of 2027.

What Samsung buys is a peptide CDMO with plants in Sweden, Belgium, France, the United States and India, a head office in Switzerland and an innovation centre in Strasbourg. The company said PolyPeptide has more than 70 years of ingredient making behind it and has produced over 1,000 therapeutic peptides. Samsung pointed to demand for obesity and diabetes drugs, GLP 1 medicines among them, and to newer peptide uses in cancer. The buyer gave no capacity figures for the target and no investment plan for its sites. Rival contract makers have been adding large peptide buildings, and Bachem's new building in Bubendorf is coming online in stages, so Samsung is buying existing plants instead of starting from bare ground.

The Songdo orders keep landing

The other half of the story is the core business. On September 10, 2026, Samsung Biologics disclosed a contract manufacturing agreement worth 350.8 billion won, about $262 million, with a European pharmaceutical company it did not name. The term runs from July 22, 2026 to December 31, 2033, and the product is a biologic, not a peptide. Production is set for its Songdo campus in Incheon. Under the confidentiality terms, the client and product stay secret until the end date, which the company said could change. Korea Biomedical Review reported that the deal equals about 7.7% of 2025 consolidated revenue and was the sixth contract the company disclosed this year, lifting cumulative orders since its 2011 founding to $21.9 billion.

A smaller order followed. Korean business press reported a disclosure in early October of a further contract with a European drugmaker, worth about 93.5 billion won and running to the end of 2031, again with the client undisclosed. These are long bookings for mammalian cell culture capacity, the kind of work Samsung was built around. They say nothing directly about peptides, which are mostly made by chemical synthesis rather than in bioreactors. They do show a CDMO with a full order book taking on a second business line at the same time, and they set the scale against which the peptide unit will be judged inside the group once the acquisition closes.

Capacity on both sides of the deal

The capacity Samsung already runs is measured in bioreactor litres. The company had about 845,000 litres across South Korea and the United States, according to Korea Biomedical Review. That figure includes a 180,000 litre plant that came online in April 2025 and a 60,000 litre site in Rockville, Maryland, bought from GSK in March 2026. The planned expansion in Songdo would lift the total to about 1.39 million litres. None of that counts toward peptide output, because solid phase peptide synthesis runs in chemical reactors and needs its own purification trains, a different asset base from cell culture. The buyer has not published a reactor volume for the plants it is acquiring.

For readers tracking who owns peptide capacity, the Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide deal is a purchase, not a build. It fits a pattern in which large groups buy finished plants, as Novo Holdings did when it bought contract maker Catalent and passed three fill finish sites to Novo Nordisk. The difference is that PolyPeptide makes the active ingredient itself rather than filling and packing finished doses. The definitive interim result sets out the remaining conditions in full. Until approvals arrive, PolyPeptide keeps running as a listed company with its own board, and Samsung has given no date for any change to its sites.

Conclusion

The Samsung Biologics PolyPeptide tender has passed its acceptance test, but merger and foreign investment clearances, a board vote and a delayed settlement still stand between the offer and ownership. Meanwhile Songdo keeps booking long biologics work, including the 350.8 billion won European contract that runs to 2033. Samsung has not said how much it will spend on PolyPeptide's plants or how much peptide output they hold, the two figures that would show what the deal does for supply.