The price of experimental monkeys has soared to 300,000 RMB per head. Who is causing the monkey shortage?
Laboratory monkeys used for human drug testing are becoming increasingly expensive.
"The spot price of one laboratory monkey has been quoted as high as 300,000 yuan per head, with orders scheduled after the Spring Festival of next year. Even 'forward monkeys' cost 150,000 to 200,000 yuan per head, which is absolutely ridiculous." A practitioner who witnessed the price of monkeys soaring from 100,000 yuan per head at the end of last year to 300,000 yuan per head sighed to vcbeat.
The price hike has also spread overseas. Vietnam, an important source of imported laboratory monkeys for China, now costs more than 100,000 yuan to import one cynomolgus monkey, while it only cost tens of thousands of yuan in the past.
The sharp surge in monkey prices directly benefits companies that hold monkey stocks. According to statistics from vcbeat, several leading domestic CROs hold a total of about 90,000 laboratory monkeys.
Joinn Laboratories, a leading domestic CRO enterprise for non-clinical safety evaluation of pharmaceuticals, disclosed an astonishing set of figures in its third-quarter report: the attributable net profit for the first three quarters was 930 million yuan, a year-on-year surge of 1051.94%.
However, a closer look reveals that out of this more than 900 million yuan, 800 million yuan comes from "fair value change of biological assets" — in layman's terms, this is not money earned from selling drugs, but the book appreciation brought by the rising "value" of the batch of laboratory monkeys raised on the company's books. This item accounts for 93% of the profit.
How many monkeys does Joinn Laboratories actually hold? According to the industry data disclosed in the prospectus of Dingtai Pharma Research, Joinn Laboratories has about 30,000 NHP (non-human primates, covering monkeys, apes and many other experimental animals) in stock. Industry calculations show that even if the monkey price stays unchanged, this batch of monkeys can bring an assessment appreciation of about 100 million yuan per quarter only through natural growth.
Facing the skyrocketing monkey price, this "major monkey holder" has behaved quite restrained instead. Joinn Laboratories believes that although the current market price is high, actual transactions are extremely rare and the market is illiquid with high nominal prices. To prevent overestimating assets, the book unit price of laboratory monkeys was not raised in the evaluation of the third quarter of 2026.
So why did the price of laboratory monkeys suddenly get out of control this round? Is it a real supply-demand gap, or are leading monkey farms hoarding monkeys to artificially push up prices? What is the real judgment of leading CROs with heavy assets on the trend of monkey prices?
"The monkey price has risen unreasonably"
In its 2018 annual report, Joinn Laboratories wrote a highly predictive sentence: "Enterprises that own primate model resources or technologies will gain the initiative in the market, and can even monopolize them as strategic resources." At that time, the average price of one laboratory monkey was less than 40,000 yuan.
Eight years later, this sentence is being fulfilled in an astonishing way.
According to the data from the prospectus of Dingtai Pharma Research, the average market price of 3-5 year-old cynomolgus monkeys (the main variety and age group of laboratory monkeys) has followed a curve of first bottoming out and then rebounding: it was 112,500 yuan per head at the end of 2023, once fell back to 81,500 yuan per head at the end of 2024, and returned to 102,000 yuan per head at the end of 2025. In mid-2026, the winning bid price of cynomolgus monkeys reached 188,000 yuan per head.
But this is only old news from half a year ago. The latest market inquiry price for cynomolgus monkeys learned by vcbeat has been quoted as 300,000 yuan per head. It should be noted that 300,000 yuan is an extreme high quotation, and few transactions are actually concluded at this price, but it truly reflects the current madness of the market.
The price increase is not limited to China. A practitioner who imports laboratory monkeys from Southeast Asia told vcbeat that driven by the rising monkey price in China, the export of laboratory monkeys across Southeast Asia is following the market trend: now the cost of importing one laboratory monkey from Vietnam has reached about 150,000 yuan, while it only cost tens of thousands of yuan in the past. "The price increase in the past two years has been too severe, too unreasonable."
Why did the monkey price take off again? We must first understand both ends of the balance.
On the demand side, the prosperity of innovative drug R&D has rebounded. The National Development and Reform Commission disclosed on November 3 that in the first three quarters of this year, the amount of outbound technology licensing (BD export) of innovative drugs in China was about 130 billion US dollars, which is close to the level of the whole of last year. The continuous recovery of financing and licensing transactions has directly ignited the R&D pipelines of pharmaceutical companies, and also ignited the demand for "living reagents" at the most upstream of the industrial chain — from university scientific research institutions to innovative pharmaceutical companies and then to CROs, laboratory monkeys run through the whole process of target verification, drug efficacy screening and toxicological safety evaluation, which is an unavoidable rigid demand for preclinical R&D.
Laboratory monkeys required for new drug clinical trials must be standardized artificially bred by units holding the "Production License for Laboratory Animals" and "Use License for Laboratory Animals", with complete genetic pedigree, controlled microbial indicators, and passed animal welfare ethical review. Wild-caught primates are strictly prohibited from flowing into the laboratory animal market. Therefore, although there are many monkeys in Mount Emei, they cannot alleviate the shortage of laboratory monkeys in China.
The deeper driving force comes from the change of drug structure. Laboratory monkeys have a genetic homology of 90%-98% with humans, and they are irreplaceable species for toxicology and immunogenicity evaluation of macromolecular drugs such as monoclonal antibodies, ADC (antibody-drug conjugates), and oligonucleotides. Macromolecules and complex molecules account for a rapidly increasing proportion in this round of innovative drug recovery, and the consumption of monkeys for a single project of such molecules is much higher than that of small molecules.
On the supply side, it is stuck in a link that no one can speed up: the growth cycle of monkeys.
According to the research report data of Galaxy Securities: cynomolgus monkeys reach sexual maturity on average in 4 years, with pregnancy and lactation periods each accounting for half a year. Baby monkeys usually need to be raised for another 2-3 years after birth before they can be used for experiments. That is to say, starting from a weaned young monkey (6 months old), it takes 6 to 7 years for it to "produce" the next generation of commercial monkeys available for experiments.
The more tricky problem is the population structure. Young breeding monkeys with the highest breeding value mainly rely on imports from abroad, while the industry population has continued to age in the past few years, with limited new production capacity.
As a result, the market presents a contradictory state: extremely high prices, very few transactions, and illiquid market with high nominal prices.
"It is a seller's market now, not a buyer's market." A practitioner described it vividly, "It is buyers holding money and looking for monkeys all over the world."
Is the price hike caused by CRO hoarding?
So, is this round of price hike caused by CROs "hoarding monkeys and holding back supplies"?
This is not groundless. There is indeed a view in the market that the shortage of laboratory monkeys in China is related to the fact that leading CROs acquired monkey farms on a large scale in previous years, leading to excessive concentration of monkey sources — when monkeys are taken into the CRO's own farms, the number of monkeys that can circulate freely in the market is naturally reduced.
In terms of actions, "hoarding monkeys" is indeed an open secret in the industry. Laboratory monkeys are the core strategic assets of CROs. Under the dual pressure of strong demand and declining supply, acquiring farms has become the most direct means to lock upstream supply: WuXi AppTec has successively acquired Guangzhou Chunsheng, Guangxi Fangchenggang Changchun, and Hainan Lingzhang; Taicang Joinn acquired Yunnan Yinmao and Guangxi Weimei; Pharmaron acquired Zhongke Lingrui (now renamed Ankai Yibo) and Zhaoqing Chuangyao; Jiangsu Dingtai acquired Kunming Yaling.
Data source: Dingtai Pharma Research prospectus, Innostem prospectus, public information
After domestic CROs intensively acquired monkey farms, they have basically mastered more than one-third of the domestic stock of laboratory monkeys. At the end of 2024, the domestic stock of laboratory monkeys was about 219,000 to 220,000, with 32,000 new baby monkeys born that year, and the actual available supply for sale was only about 30,000. According to statistics from vcbeat, the NHP stock of domestic CROs in 2025 was about 90,000.
However, in the view of insiders, "hoarding monkeys" and "monopolizing to raise prices" are two different things. There are two reasons: first, the overall domestic laboratory monkey market is in short supply, and the monkeys hoarded by CROs are mainly used to digest their own orders, rather than cornering the market and waiting for higher prices; second, the supply channels are diversified, and the import channels are being opened up, so no enterprise can truly lock the market price. The fundamental reason for the price hike is still the imbalance between supply and demand.
The channel for importing laboratory monkeys is gradually widening. According to the reply from the Forestry and Grassland Bureau of Hebei Province to the Proposal No. 1088 of the 4th meeting of the 14th People's Congress of Hebei Province, since 2023, the General Administration of Customs has actively promoted the access of foreign laboratory monkeys to China, and has facilitated the access of artificially bred monkeys from Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and other countries.
According to the query data of the General Administration of Customs of China, under the commodity code 0106111000, in 2025, China imported 9198 improved primates for breeding from Cambodia, and 1338 improved primates for breeding from Vietnam. The import channels can effectively supplement the domestic supply of laboratory monkeys.
But the import channel is not as simple as turning on a tap to get water. In addition to the CITES quota (the quota restriction on primate trade under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), the actual import scale is also restricted by two major hard bottlenecks: first, there are few overseas compliant breeding farms — laboratory monkeys must meet strict experimental standards, and finding qualified overseas suppliers and establishing stable cooperation is the premise of import; second, domestic isolation field resources are tight — the number of isolation fields that meet the new construction standards is limited, and monkeys have to queue for isolation as soon as they enter the country, and the hardware restricts the upper limit of customs clearance.
Although the objective effect of CRO hoarding monkeys narrowing the freely circulating monkey sources and the markup by middlemen in import channels have contributed to pushing up the price of laboratory monkeys, these two factors are not enough to monopolize the market. What really determines the tight supply of laboratory monkeys is the deep-seated contradiction in the supply-demand structure: on the one hand, the continuous expansion of innovative drug R&D brings rising demand; on the other hand, the breeding cycle of laboratory monkeys is too long, and the supply cannot respond quickly, thus locking the upper limit of supply.
How long can this round of price hike last?
For the price peak that the market is most concerned about, the predictions of insiders are relatively consistent: the current price of laboratory monkeys has approached the top, and the top range may be 350,000 to 400,000 yuan per head. The shortage of laboratory monkey supply may be alleviated in the next two to three years.
The first major logic supporting this judgment is that it takes two to three years to re-breed after introducing baby monkeys. This round of price hikes has prompted domestic monkey farms to increase the introduction of breeding monkeys. When this batch of breeding monkeys matures, the market will turn to a buyer's market in the future.
vcbeat also learned that leading domestic CROs introduced a batch of breeding monkeys of suitable childbearing age in early 2026. According to the breeding cycle calculation, it is expected that this batch will bring a significant increase in the number of marketable monkeys in two or three years. At the same time, the number of self-bred laboratory monkeys in the industry has maintained a slow but steady growth in recent years.
The second logic is that with the liberalization of the import policy for non-human primate laboratory animals, the supply is more diversified. According to data from the General Administration of Customs, Cambodia and Vietnam are the two main source countries for China's laboratory monkey imports, among which Cambodia occupies a dominant position, and Vietnam's import volume is also continuing to increase.
These two countries are also the core producing areas of laboratory monkeys in the world, so domestic buyers are not facing regional competition, but "snatching monkeys" with global giants — in January 2026, Charles River Laboratories, the global CRO leader, announced the acquisition of a non-human primate supplier in Cambodia for 510 million US dollars, which is a landmark event in this resource scramble. When giants choose to directly lock upstream production capacity through mergers and acquisitions, the bargaining space on the channel side will be further squeezed.
Facing the crowded traditional channels, domestic CRO enterprises have begun to try to "detour" to develop countries with sufficient monkey sources such as Indonesia and Laos where the import channels are not yet unobstructed. This is both an opportunity and an adventure: the new channel means lower procurement costs and fewer competitors, but the docking of quarantine standards, policy fluctuations in exporting countries, and the construction of transportation and isolation systems all require time and capital investment.
On the whole, the high point of laboratory monkey prices has most likely appeared at the present moment, but the peak of prices does not mean the end of the monkey shortage. Before the joint force of self-breeding capacity release (in two or three years) and the gradual unblocking of overseas channels is truly formed, the market will remain in a "tight balance at high prices" state — the decline of monkey prices is the general direction, and the speed of decline depends on the fulfillment rhythm of these two paths on the supply side. What is certain is that this round of monkey shortage is teaching the whole industry a lesson: for biological resources with long cycles, the most expensive thing is never the price, but time.
References:
Making a fortune by raising "laboratory monkeys"? "Monkey Moutai" Joinn Laboratories talks about monkey prices: the future trend is difficult to predict — Shell Finance
Rigid demand for innovative drug R&D, high prosperity in the dual main lines of mice + monkeys — Galaxy Securities
Joinn Laboratories Q3 2026 performance exchange meeting — Star Research Report
This article is from the WeChat official account "vcbeat" (ID: vcbeat), author: Yang Xue, published with authorization from 3