European Pharmaceutical Capex Project Sector Outlook 2025 – France, Belgium, Netherlands

The European pharmaceutical capex sector outlook for France, Belgium and the Netherlands is a mixed picture. We are seeing France pull ahead of Belgium and the Netherlands for upcoming pharmaceutical sector capital expenditure due to a number of push and pull factors.

European Pharmaceutical Capex Trends – Belgium and the Netherlands

Belgium is overall the slowest region for attracting new pharmaceutical capex and is lagging behind the other countries in terms of capex planning, approval and implementation. This seems to be more of a case of Belgium losing out to France and, to a lesser extent, the Netherlands. As such, we expect the picture in Belgium to continue to be challenging for the next year at least.

Where capex is coming down the pipeline, this tends to be smaller-scale fit-out and upgrade projects to allow existing plant to meet new standards or service demand for growth products.

The Netherlands is facing challenges, particularly around grid capacity, which is currently meaning many energy-intensive pharmaceutical manufacturing projects are going across the border to energy-rich France.

There are problems in both countries with recruitment and resourcing, meaning that it is difficult for willing companies looking to approve capex to get projects off the ground currently.

The Netherlands is still seeing some capex filtering through from the big producers such as AstraZeneca and Abbot in both production and fill/finish. There is also some promising start-up activity in the Netherlands to watch out for which may result in scale-up projects as these start-ups try to commercialise emerging products.

There are some signs that 2025 will be more buoyant for European pharmaceutical capex in Belgium and the Netherlands, so it is an area to monitor closely.

European Pharmaceutical Capex Trends – France

The French pharmaceutical sector is very buoyant as we move towards 2025. The feared political deadlock produced by the latest election results has not had any material impact on the capex pipeline for French pharmaceutical, life sciences or cosmetics producers.

Biotech investment has slowed down slightly, in favour of a massive push on drug security, where generics and common drug production is being on-shored to move away from recent shortages.

Government action has doubtless contributed to the buoyant picture, with foreign investment flowing into France from neighbouring countries where challenges around energy grid capacity, resources or land costs make France very appealing for new capex. Initiatives such as the Choose France scheme and positive infrastructure investment has all contributed.

The capex picture in France for the year ahead looks very positive, with large organisations announcing big budget schemes in growth areas. One such boom area is cosmetics, where growing demand is fuelling capex into new processing and R&D sites, with a focus on ‘natural’ ingredients. Another is weight-loss drugs, which is opening up capex across all of Europe, with France being one of the biggest winners currently.

Medical cannabis is another area that continues to contribute toward a positive capex outlook in France as licences are now beginning to be granted for its production.

Recent legislation to push manufacturers into re-using wastewater means there is likely to be a continued rush of capex with high requirement for water filtration and wastewater treatment technologies. Furthermore, a growing focus on sustainability of production and carbon-neutrality efforts mean sustainability is high on many manufacturers list of priorities and is an area of active investment.

Our Coverage

At Protel, we are currently covering over 180 European pharmaceutical capex projects in the pharmaceutical, biotech, life sciences and cosmetics sectors in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

These projects are worth a combined potential value of €10bn with full details available to Protel subscribers.

Conclusion

Overall, suppliers of capital equipment and machinery should ensure that they are well informed to be able to capitalise on the smaller, fast-moving schemes that will be dominating Belgium and to a lesser extent, the Netherlands, over the next few years.

France is a big difference here, with levels of capex very buoyant – it is an area that companies or all sizes should be targeting. The language barrier is becoming less of an issue, and with the right cultural approach and intelligence data, suppliers can doubtless build fruitful long-term supplier relationships in this region.

There are project schemes of varying scales to target, and capex is emerging in a diverse range of growth areas.

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