Resilience, Risk & Relationships: Report From External Manufacturing Leaders At CDMO Live Europe 2026

If your supply resilience strategy relies on dual sourcing across your full portfolio, you may be managing a fiction rather than a risk. That was one of the sharper conclusions from a confidential think tank held in Rotterdam at CDMO Live Europe 2026, where senior external manufacturing leaders from companies including Pfizer, Bayer, Takeda, BioNTech, and Sandoz spoke frankly about what actually works.

The consensus on dual sourcing was blunt: it's commercially viable for active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and critical long-lead-time materials, and not much else. For the rest, the smarter question is recovery time, not source count. Several participants described maintaining "silent sources" on paper that would be useless in a real crisis, and argued it's better to remove them than pretend they constitute mitigation.

On CDMO partnerships, the group was equally direct. Quality is a baseline, not a differentiator. Service, cost, and cash are the real selection criteria. And what separates a strategic relationship from a transactional one isn't the contract — it's whether your CDMO calls you before a problem becomes a crisis.

Internal governance, transparent communication, and face-to-face relationship investment emerged as the foundations everything else depends on.

Download the full report to pressure-test your own sourcing strategy against what your peers are actually doing.