BeOne: going global

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“From the beginning, we set out to do things differently.”

- John Oyler, CEO, BeOne

This is the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse, a symbol of energy and ambition. Those qualities were what first drew us to BeOne. When John Oyler and Xiaodong Wang founded the company in 2010, they were not simply building another biotech. They set out to tackle some of the world’s most prevalent diseases, proving that breakthrough medicines could be discovered and developed through a global model, helping to shape the future of medicine.

That sort of ambition, when matched with credibility, is often what we look for in Long Term Global Growth (LTGG). After all, outlier companies rarely begin with modest aspirations.

Oyler and Wang were highly credible as founders. Oyler had already built commercial experience in clinical research and understood what it took to create an operating business. Wang brought scientific stature, as one of the few researchers elected to both the US and Chinese Academies of Sciences. What struck us early was how grounded they seemed in the practical question of how such ambition might be realised.

However, more than five years on from our initial investment, the shares have not yet delivered an outlier return for LTGG client portfolios. It leaves a fair question: has the investment case genuinely progressed, or have we simply been too patient?

Beyond ambition

A perennial challenge in healthcare investing is that promising science rarely becomes a durable business. Early data can look exciting, pipelines can appear rich, and management teams can sound convincing. But translating that promise into a scalable commercial model is often where the story comes unstuck.

Even in businesses with world-class science, as past LTGG holdings such as Moderna and BioNTech have shown, the harder question is often whether scientific success can develop into enduring commercial and organisational strength.

In our early interactions, BeOne’s approach looked different. Better cancer outcomes would not come from scientific breakthroughs alone, but from re-engineering the clinical development process itself. Oncology drugs are expensive to develop, with clinical development accounting for as much as 90 percent of the total cost. Trials are slow, operationally cumbersome and enormously costly.

BeOne recognised early that countries like China, Korea, Australia and Poland offered structural advantages in clinical development with a large patient population, faster recruitment and lower trial costs. The opportunity was to combine those advantages with global standards and build a development engine that could move drugs through the clinic faster and at scale.

The business had been assembled with that in mind. Research was built in-house and closely linked to clinical development, trial execution and manufacturing. The result was an unusually integrated model, designed to improve the economics of drug development. It allowed BeOne to develop drugs about 30 percent faster and more cheaply than global peers, a meaningful edge in an industry where time and cost so often determine returns.

Amgen, one of the world’s largest biotech companies, decided to acquire a 20 percent stake and partner with BeOne in China, which looked to us like external validation of emerging global credibility.
In the five years since, that capability has deepened, as we discovered in a recent engagement with BeOne. In one programme, the company started several years behind rivals yet narrowed the gap sharply by the Phase 3 trials stage, through faster and more efficient execution.

BeOne does not always need to be first if its development engine can close ground quickly enough. And increasingly, that is the nub of the investment case: the value may lie in the platform, not individual drugs.

Turning promise into progress

The BeOne research engine is becoming more productive, too. The number of pre-clinical programmes has risen 2.5-fold – from 34 in 2020 to 82 last year. Meanwhile, the number of internally developed drugs entering the clinic reached a record 10 in 2024 (for context, most mid-sized biotech companies advance only one or two into the clinic each year).

That does not mean every programme will succeed, but it does suggest a research organisation producing more output, across more modalities, with increasing consistency.

This advancement is no longer confined to the pipeline. BeOne has made remarkable commercial progress with BRUKINSA, now a best-in-class haematology medicine with a leading position in the US market and growth of more than 50 percent year-over-year.

BRUKINSA rapidly became the global BTKi leader

Global covalent BTKi quarterly revenue ($M)

Source: BeOne, Q4 and Full Year 2025 Results and company public filings. Quarterly global covalent BTKi revenue includes BeOne’s BRUKINSA and competitor products IMBRUVICA and CALQUENCE. IMB = IMBRUVICA; CAL = CALQUENCE; BRU = BRUKINSA.

In China, TEVIMBRA, which is designed to work with the immune system to attack advanced or metastatic solid tumours, has grown to approximately 25 percent market share in short order, reflecting both the strength of the asset and BeOne’s execution in a highly competitive market.

This progress has transformed BeOne’s economics during our ownership. Revenues have risen tenfold to more than $5bn, the company turned profitable last year, and gross margins reached an industry-leading 87 percent. These signposts matter because they suggest that BeOne is beginning to cross the line that many healthcare companies never do, from scientific promise to a scalable, enduring business. 

The sources of friction

The stock market’s hesitance to ascribe more value to this progress has not been entirely misplaced. BeOne has a strong footprint in China in a sector where geopolitics, regulation and trust matter enormously. Its response has been pragmatic. 

The opening of an $800m manufacturing facility in New Jersey in July 2024, followed a year later by a change of name from BeiGene to BeOne Medicines (alongside a move in headquarters to Switzerland), all suggest a company adapting to a global environment. 

Those steps may reduce risk over time, but they also acknowledge that the path to becoming a global oncology company now carries more political and regulatory friction than it once did.

A recent discussion with the company’s scientific founder offered an intriguing counterpoint to the more optimistic views of our colleagues on the ground in China. His instinct is that, over the coming decade, the domestic biotech ecosystem will be better at generating incremental innovation around proven ideas than genuinely novel breakthroughs. 

Too few globally proven leaders, a clinical ecosystem still short of best practice, a shallow pool of long-term domestic capital and a reimbursement system prone to steep price cuts all help explain that view. They also help explain why the market remains hesitant to give BeOne full credit. Against that backdrop, the company’s progress looks even more impressive.

The same conversation also offered a more grounded perspective on AI. Wang was notably downbeat on its ability to transform early-stage drug discovery over the next decade. His point was not that AI would be irrelevant, but that its effects on medical outcomes were more likely to diffuse gradually than arrive as a sudden leap in productivity. 

Investment markets are often drawn to clean technological narratives. For BeOne, however, infrastructure and execution are more likely to matter than any sudden AI breakthrough.

Harder to ignore

The question now is whether our patience is being rewarded by genuine progress in the investment case. We think it is.

BeOne no longer looks like a company dependent on one or two lucky breaks. It looks increasingly like an oncology platform with repeatable capabilities: a stronger clinical engine, growing commercial reach and clearer evidence that it can develop and sell medicines at scale.

Even assuming a sharp slowdown in BRUKINSA, with growth halving to about 25 percent, revenues could still treble over the next five years, while TEVIMBRA could feasibly double if it sustains anything close to its current pace.

Add the possibility of broader use for both drugs, further pipeline approvals, emerging autoimmune capabilities and a growing contribution from the Amgen partnership, and the shape of the opportunity becomes clearer.

The path will almost certainly differ from this sketch, and the political and scientific risks remain real. But the payoffs look attractive because the market may still be valuing BeOne as a speculative Chinese biotech, rather than the emerging global oncology platform that it is becoming.

Risk Factors

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As at March 31, 2026

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