HONG KONG – Expansion among Chinese biotech companies China Biologic Products Inc. (CBPO) and Wuxi Pharmatech (Cayman) Inc. that recently announced full-year 2014 results has ranged from fast to too fast – with the former seeing a more than doubling of its share price and the latter watching its shares tumble over the past year.

CBPO (NASDAQ:CBPO), a leading plasma-based biopharmaceutical company, released its 2014 financial results reporting another year of strong growth. Its total sales were $243 million, an increase of 19.6 percent from $203 million in 2013. Volume increases in sales of plasma-based products and placenta polypeptide products are the major contributing factors to that jump.

The positive results helped the company's share price more than double in a year from $36.76 in March 2014. Shares closed Monday at $82.72.

"We are very pleased to finish 2014 with strong top-line and bottom-line growth, significant operational developments, as well as an improved shareholder structure," said David Gao, chairman and CEO of CBPO. "Our healthy financial growth was supported by strong market demand, stable product pricing, increased production capacity after the renewal of good manufacturing practice certification at our Guizhou facility, stringent cost control measures, the optimization of our product portfolio mix and the successful implementation of our sales strategy in tier-one cities."

Human albumin and intravenous immunoglobulin products remained the company's largest sales contributors, taking up 39 percent and 40 percent, respectively, of total sales over the last year. The average price for the two products remained stable thanks to a combination of a higher government-imposed retail price ceiling, reduced value-added tax rate and CBPO's sales focus on increasing the market shares of intravenous immunoglobulin products in tier-one cities and new markets.

The company also benefited from higher volumes of plasma collection and approvals to build two new plasma collection centers in Hebei Province as well as from expanded production capacity of placenta polypeptide products. Revenue from placenta polypeptide products grew from 6 percent to 10 percent of total sales in 2014, compared with 2013, thanks to the higher volume from the expanded and upgraded facilities of member company Guizhou Taibang Biological Products Co. Ltd. after it received the GMP certification in January 2014.

WUXI'S 2014 DROP

Meanwhile, another Chinese biotech company, also focused on business expansion, saw its biggest stock decline since May 2014, despite posting higher revenues for the year.

Wuxi (NYSE:WX), a leading R&D service provider for pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies, reported net revenue increases of 17 percent year on year to $674 million. Still, the company's stock dropped 7.2 percent to $38.01 after Wuxi announced big capital spending plans of between $180 million and $200 million.

"We made investments in 2014 in new capabilities, including talent, new laboratories and technologies, particularly in manufacturing, biologics, genomics, R&D, sales and marketing, and information technology, to sustain our business growth," said Ge Li, chairman and CEO of Wuxi, at the financial results conference.

"We continue to invest to strengthen our core businesses, particularly in expansion of capacity," Li said. "We are also investing aggressively in 2015 in new businesses to seize opportunities for further growth."

The expansion is ambitious. Wuxi is building a new small-molecule manufacturing facility in Changzhou that will be finished in late 2015 to early 2016. The company said it will also begin building commercial-scale biologics manufacturing facilities near its clinical facilities in Wuxi city, Jiangsu Province, this year and plans to complete the construction in late 2016. Each of those manufacturing facilities will cost $150 million.

On top of the new facilities in China, Wuxi is building two new cell therapy manufacturing facilities in Philadelphia, which will be completed in 2015 and 2016 at a cost of $40 million.

"We have been good at planting seeds when we see emerging business opportunities, and we don't hesitate to invest to capture growing demand and to capitalize on market trends," said Li. "We did so in the past few years in building our small-molecule manufacturing business and our biologics business in China by investing aggressively. . . . Now we are getting strong growth and returns from these investments."

Wuxi's stock is virtually flat for the year, closing Monday at $36.57.

A number of biotech companies listed in Hong Kong such as Luye Pharma (HK:2186), which went public last year, and Lee's Pharmaceutical (HK:0950) have not yet announced financial results for the year.