Samsung Biologics Brand Guidelines: Songdo Plants, a 2011 Start & a Pure-Play CDMO

A Samsung group start in Incheon’s Songdo district.

Samsung Biologics is the contract development and manufacturing arm that the Samsung group set up for biologic medicines. The company’s own milestones page dates its foundation to April 2011 and the groundbreaking of its first plant to May of that year, in Songdo, the planned district of Incheon where it is still headquartered. Wikipedia describes it as the biotech division of Samsung Group, with services running from late discovery to large-scale commercial manufacturing.

The first plant reached manufacturing readiness for drug substance in June 2013, the company says, and early manufacturing partnerships with Bristol-Myers Squibb and Roche followed in 2013. In 2012 it had set up Samsung Bioepis, a biosimilar developer, as a joint venture with Biogen, Wikipedia says; Samsung Biologics took full ownership in 2022 by buying Biogen’s remaining shares.

The company listed on the Korea Exchange’s KOSPI market in November 2016, according to its milestones page. Its history since then includes a long accounting case. Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service concluded that a 2015 change in how Samsung Biologics accounted for its control of Samsung Bioepis amounted to intentional accounting fraud, and the Securities and Futures Commission imposed two rounds of sanctions in July and November 2018, including an order to restate its financial statements, a fine and a recommendation to dismiss executives, The Asia Business Daily reported. The company went to court in November 2018, and the sanctions were suspended while the cases ran; Korea JoongAng Daily reported in October 2019 that the Supreme Court had upheld that suspension.

In August 2024 the Seoul Administrative Court cancelled the second round of sanctions at first instance, finding that some grounds could not be recognised. In June 2025 the Seoul High Court upheld the cancellation of the first round, holding that it had been absorbed into the second; the appeal on the second round was still before the High Court at that point, The Asia Business Daily reported.

Five plants, measured in litres.

Samsung Biologics presents itself largely through scale. Its milestones page lists each plant by capacity and build time: Plant 1 at 30,000 litres; Plant 2, which the company calls its largest single plant, at 155,000 litres, ready for drug substance in 2016; Plant 3 at 180,000 litres, ready in October 2018; Plant 4 at 240,000 litres, ready in June 2023; and Plant 5, at 180,000 litres, ready in April 2025 after what the company describes as 24 months of construction. Wikipedia counts four plants built between 2011 and 2023 and a fifth begun in 2023.

The work covers monoclonal antibodies, bispecific antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates and mRNA, Wikipedia says, and the company’s own site adds drug product and aseptic fill-finish. A dedicated ADC facility in Songdo was ready in February 2025, according to the company. During the pandemic it handled fill-finish, packaging and labelling of Moderna’s mRNA vaccine, Wikipedia says, and it was contracted to make antibody treatments for Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca.

Alongside the plants sits a set of named in-house platforms. Wikipedia lists S-CHOice, a cell-line technology introduced in 2020, and S-DUAL, a bispecific antibody platform launched in 2022 with the candidate-selection service DEVELOPICK; later additions include S-Tensify, S-AfuCHO and S-HiCon. In 2025 the company launched ExellenS, a framework that standardises equipment, processes and specifications across its plants, and in June 2025 it added an organoid-based drug-screening service, its milestones page says.

The footprint has spread beyond Korea. Wikipedia records offices in New Jersey and Boston from 2020 and in Tokyo in 2025. In 2025 Samsung Biologics agreed to buy the former Human Genome Sciences production facilities in Rockville, Maryland, from GSK, its first US manufacturing site, and the company says the acquisition was completed in April 2026. In July 2026 it announced an offer for the Swiss peptide manufacturer PolyPeptide Group, which it expected to complete by the end of December 2026, Wikipedia says; at the time of writing that acquisition had not been completed.

How drug-manufacturing partners present themselves.

Contract development and manufacturing organisations, or CDMOs, make medicines for other companies. A drug developer may hand them a cell line, a molecule or a finished formula, and the partner develops the process, makes the drug substance, fills it into vials, syringes or capsules and packs it for trials or for sale. Most of that work happens out of public view, under the customer’s name rather than the maker’s, so the manufacturer’s own brand speaks mainly to other businesses.

The imagery of the trade is fairly consistent. Websites and brochures tend to show tall stainless-steel bioreactors and rows of single-use bags in bright, white production suites; operators in full gowns, hoods and gloves working in cleanrooms; and filling lines carrying glass vials. Aerial photographs of large new plants, often shown under construction or on opening day, stand in for scale, and site maps of a global network do the same job for reach.

Much of the brand work happens at trade events. CPHI, the pharmaceutical trade fair, and the BIO International Convention in the United States are where these companies take stands, announce deals and, at times, unveil new identities: Pharma Manufacturing reported that Catalent introduced its new corporate brand at CPHI Frankfurt in 2025.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — where it began, who owns it now, which sites and services it describes, and what has been reported about it — and separates documented facts from what the companies say about themselves. The colours and typefaces used here are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A pure-play CDMO under a group name.

The biggest recent change to the company was structural. In May 2025 Samsung Biologics announced it would separate its contract manufacturing business from Samsung Bioepis, placing the biosimilar developer under a new holding company tentatively named Samsung Epis Holdings, KED Global reported; the company said the split would sharpen each business’s focus and reduce clients’ concerns about intellectual-property conflicts. Shareholders received stakes in both companies. Samsung Epis Holdings announced its establishment in November 2025 and was set to list on the Korea Exchange on 24 November 2025, BioPharma APAC reported, with Samsung Bioepis as its wholly owned subsidiary. Samsung Biologics’ milestones page records November 2025 as its transition to a pure-play CDMO.

That leaves a company whose name carries the group’s brand but whose public face is industrial. Its website leads with the line “Driven. For Life.” and with figures — total capacity, regulatory approvals, client counts — rather than with products. Plants are numbered rather than named, and platforms carry a consistent “S-” prefix, from S-CHOice to S-HiCon, which gives the technical offer a family resemblance.

For a design guide, Samsung Biologics shows how a contract manufacturer builds an identity out of numbered plants, capacity figures and a naming system for its platforms, while borrowing the authority of a large group name. Compare Samsung, the electronics company that shares the group name, and Lonza, another large biologics manufacturer. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steel blue and a pale mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Samsung Biologics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.