CRO

AMRI gets its desert branch back online after a profit-sapping outage

After a weather-related shutdown at a New Mexico facility helped tank its quarterly earnings, AMRI ($AMRI) has rectified the issue, bringing its plant back online as it works to get back on the path to growth.

The Albuquerque operation, acquired in AMRI's $110 million deal for Oso Biopharmaceuticals earlier this year, is back in operation after about two months on the fritz thanks to "an environmental deviation in one manufacturing suite as a result of a weather-related business interruption," the company said. The site is an aseptic manufacturing facility that produces sterile injectables.

Now AMRI can focus on repairing what it has lost in the eyes of investors. Last quarter, the New York company swung to an $8.6 million net loss on $62.5 million in total revenue, coming in well below what analysts expected. The miss forced AMRI to scale back its ambitions for the full year, reducing its best-case sales scenario by about 8% to $261 million and cutting its earnings-per-share guidance by 20% to 73 cents.

That sent the contract drug developer's shares down more than 25% in a day, and AMRI's value has dipped another 6% in the ensuing weeks.

But AMRI believes it can resume the predictable growth that has characterized its last year in business. For 2015, the company is projecting contract revenue to come in between $310 million and $345 million a 27% increase at the midpoint.

AMRI has spent the past few years working to reduce its dependence on royalty revenue, tied largely to Sanofi's ($SNY) Allegra, focusing instead on contract manufacturing. In addition to the Oso deal, AMRI traded $41 million this year for Cedarburg Pharmaceuticals, another outsourcing outfit, and the company has gradually moved away from some slower-growing early-stage services.

- read the statement