Without a doubt, the three largest cord blood banks in the U.S. are:
- Cord Blood Registry (San Bruno, CA)
- Cryo-Cell (Oldsmar, FL)
- ViaCord (Waltham, MA)
These three companies are not only the three market leaders in the U.S. by number of cord blood and cord tissue units banked, but are also some of the largest cord blood banks worldwide.
Among these three industry leaders, Cord Blood Registry (CBR) is the clear leader. To date, it has preserved approximately 700,000 umbilical cord blood and cord tissue units. This is substantially more than its nearest competitor, Cryo-Cell, which recently reported in its Third Quarter 2017 results that it has reached 500,00 units in storage collected across 87 countries. ViaCord has at least 360,000 units in storage and likely closer to 400,000, because it hasn’t reported new storage metrics in the past 12 months.
In a historic event that occurred in June 2015, CBR was acquired by the pharmaceutical giant, AMAG Pharmaceuticals, for $700 million. The transaction valued Cord Blood Registry at over 5.55 times revenue and over 15.55 times EBITDA.
The acquisition of CBR by AMAG Pharmaceuticals was a strategic move to bolster AMAG’s portfolio of maternal health products and to expand its reach by leveraging CBR’s established sales network within Ob/Gyn clinics, hospitals, and labor units throughout the United States.
Because BioInformant is the first and only market research firm to specialize in the stem cell industry, we have tracked the cord blood banking market for more than a decade (2006 to present). For this reason, we are uniquely interested to know CBR’s full-year 2017 revenue derived from cord blood and tissue banking services.
From our perspective, the main upside of CBR’s acquisition by AMAG Pharmaceuticals is that CBR’s revenue figures are now publicly reported.
How much revenue did AMAG generate from CBR’s cord blood and tissue banking in 2017?
To answer this question, we dug into AMAG Pharmaceuticals’ U.S. SEC Form 8-K released January 8, 2018.
It states:
“AMAG expects 2017 total….CBR service revenue of approximately $114 million.”
AMAG Pharmaceuticals also reported that “Cord Blood Registry® (CBR) service revenue was approximately $30 million” during 4th Quarter 2017.”
This suggests that the company’s revenue was not evenly distributed over the course of the year, because $30 million x 4 would have equaled $120 million (instead of $114 million).
In other interesting news, Bloomberg recently reported (in a paid access article) that AMAG may be weighing the possibility of the sale of CBR, stating that: “AMAG Pharma (NASDAQ: AMAG) is exploring options including a sale of its Cord Blood Registry business following interest from potential buyers, according to Bloomberg…”
