Our strategy – Abcam plc

Investors

Sustaining long-term profitable growth

Our goal is to create sustainable social and financial value, by helping accelerate the pace of discovery, and the translation of those discoveries into social impact. We are uniformly committed to responsibly pursuing that goal through our purpose and have a clear strategy to achieve this.

In September 2019, we set out the following strategic goals to guide our activities:

1. Sustain and extend our antibody and digital leadership (“Lead“)
2. Drive continued expansion into complementary market adjacencies (“Expand“)
3. Build organisational scalability and sustain value creation (“Scale“)

Underlying these goals are six growth strategies which form the foundation of our growth strategy and value creation plan for the medium-term. They are designed to help us grow together; not just as a Company, but as a global team, and to do so in an efficient and effective way.

Use the tabs below to explore our growth pillars and strategies:

Growth strategies Lead Expand Scale

1. Extend leadership in RUO antibodies

PILLARS: LEAD

Our growth strategy starts with a commitment to extending our antibody leadership. Fundamental to our purpose, we are committed to help advance and accelerate our customers’ research and, in turn, support our market share gains. We seek to do this through the ongoing curation and expansion of our product portfolio, combined with the addition of data, knowledge and information that demonstrates the performance and increased utility of those products in a broader range of experiments and applications.

Our strategy is enhanced through our focus on in-house proprietary products, including one of the world’s largest portfolios of recombinant rabbit monoclonal antibodies. Through continuous innovation we are focused on ensuring that our portfolio is aligned with the targets, research areas and biological pathways in highest demand from our customers.

2. Remove innovation constraints and launch new lines

PILLARS: EXPAND

We are developing our innovation capabilities to meet a broader range of our customers’ needs. This is enabling us to grow within our addressable markets and at the same
time provides us with in-house tools to increase the rate at which we can expand our portfolio of in-house antibodies.

Specifically, we are focused on 1) antibody-derived products for high value, high growth markets, including immunoassays; 2) complementary product areas that simultaneously remove constraints to antibody innovation, including bioactive proteins and engineered cell lines; and 3) Providing antibodies and reagents to third-party instrumentation platforms and multiplex partners.

3. Be a leading discovery partner for biopharma organisations

PILLARS: EXPAND

Diagnostic and biopharmaceutical companies are increasingly seeking product development partners with unique antibody and assay development capabilities, such as ours, to complement their in-house programmes. Through our portfolio of high-performance in-house products, combined with a growing innovation, commercial and manufacturing capability, our goal is to be a leading discovery partner for these strategic customers. We believe this will lead to increased opportunities for the development of custom solutions, partnerships, and collaborations.

4. Be a leading digital company

PILLARS: LEAD

Our digital platform and online presence remains an important differentiator in our markets. Our goal is to significantly enhance our digital channel by establishing a highly personalised digital relationship with our customers, which will be device agnostic, cloud based and driven by artificial intelligence. We believe this will help us to uniquely understand and anticipate researchers’ needs and to provide them with the right set of tools to advance their research. Through faster response to customers and greater personalisation of the user experience, we aim to provide our customers with more relevant content to support their work.

5. Remove scalability constraints and sustain value

PILLARS: SCALE

Our objective is to strengthen our teams, systems and infrastructure while driving operational efficiency. We are focused on increasing our manufacturing capacity, increasing automation at process bottlenecks and optimising our global network and procurement functions. We are also transforming our systems and processes by implementing Oracle Cloud enterprise resource planning (“ERP”) and other software solutions to replace legacy information technology systems. We are also focused on expanding our operations in multiple high growth regions, including China.

6. Selectively pursue acquisitions

PILLARS: LEAD, SCALE, EXPAND

We have a strong track record of successfully identifying, completing and integrating strategic acquisitions and investments. Our strong brand, broad platform, global infrastructure and diversified customer base has allowed us to generate growth and operating leverage through acquisitions. We intend to continue to pursue opportunistic acquisitions in our existing and adjacent customer segments to accelerate our growth, expand geographic coverage and augment our capabilities and workflow solutions.

Sustain and expand antibody and digital leadership.

1. Extend leadership in RUO antibodies

4. Be a leading digital company

6. Selectively pursue acquisitions

Drive continued expansion into complementary market adjacencies.

2. Remove innovation constraints and launch new lines

3. Be a leading discovery partner for biopharma organisations

Diagnostic and biopharmaceutical companies are increasingly seeking product development partners with unique antibody and assay development capabilities, such as ours, to complement their in-house programmes (see Our Markets). Through our portfolio of high-performance in-house products, combined with a growing innovation, commercial and manufacturing capability, our goal is to be a leading discovery partner for these strategic customers. We believe this will lead to increased opportunities for the development of custom solutions, partnerships, and collaborations.

6. Selectively pursue acquisitions

Build organisational scalability and sustain value creation.

5. Remove scalability constraints and sustain value

6. Selectively pursue acquisitions

The more successful we can be as a business, the greater the difference we can make in the world. That extends to doing business the right way. In 2020 we undertook our most comprehensive effort yet to understand and measure our impact in the form of a Sustainability Review that involved engaging with a broad range of stakeholders. You can read more about this at the link below:

View our sustainability framework