There is no other major pharmaceutical company in the world with Ferring’s profile: a Swiss, privately owned, 75-year-old specialty biopharma company where roughly half of revenue comes from reproductive medicine. In 2024, revenue reached $2,840 million. And in 2022, Ferring did something no company had done before: it won FDA approval for a product made from donated human stool.
Approximately 49 per cent of Ferring’s revenue comes from reproductive medicine. That single number makes Ferring unique in global pharma. There are companies with fertility products in their portfolios. There is no other company of this scale where fertility is the business.
Ferring’s reproductive medicine franchise spans the full arc of assisted reproduction: ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval, embryo transfer, and luteal phase support. The company’s products are used in IVF clinics on every continent. When a couple in Tokyo or Toronto or Johannesburg undergoes fertility treatment, there is a meaningful probability that at least one Ferring product is part of the protocol.
The focus has been deliberate since the company’s founding in 1950. Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish scientist, built Ferring around peptide hormones, the signalling molecules that regulate reproduction, growth, and metabolism. The peptide expertise that began as a scientific interest became a commercial moat. Manufacturing complex peptide hormones at pharmaceutical grade is not trivial, and the barriers to entry have kept Ferring’s position durable in ways that small-molecule franchises often are not. Revenue grew from $2,102 million in 2020 to $2,840 million in 2024, with the reproductive medicine portfolio providing the stable base that funded expansion into adjacent areas.
In late 2022, the FDA approved REBYOTA (fecal microbiota, live-jslm), making it the first product derived from human donor stool ever approved by a regulatory agency. The indication: recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection, a gut disease that kills roughly 20,000 Americans per year and hospitalises many more. The treatment involved administering a preparation of screened, processed donor faecal microbiota rectally to restore a healthy gut microbiome in patients who had failed standard antibiotic therapy.
The scientific premise was simple. The execution was anything but. Ferring had to build an entirely novel supply chain: recruiting and screening stool donors, processing biological material to pharmaceutical standards, establishing quality controls for a product that was, by definition, derived from human waste, and convincing regulators that the product met safety and efficacy thresholds for a Biologics License Application. No regulatory template existed. Ferring wrote one.
REBYOTA mattered beyond its commercial contribution because it validated the microbiome as a therapeutic frontier. For decades, researchers had theorised that manipulating gut bacteria could treat disease. Ferring turned the theory into an FDA-approved product. It is also, perhaps, the most unexpected achievement in the company’s history: a fertility-focused pharma company earning a place in medical history through faecal transplant technology.
Ferring is privately owned, and the difference between a private and public pharmaceutical company shows up most clearly in the revenue trajectory. There are no dramatic spikes from mega-acquisitions financed with debt. There are no sudden troughs from failed integration. Instead, the line moves upward with the steadiness of a company that adds capability incrementally: $2,102 million in 2020, $2,336 million in 2021 (a record, with 14 per cent growth), $2,461 million in 2022 (another record), a modest dip to $2,371 million in 2023, then $2,840 million in 2024 (8 per cent growth), and $2,717 million in 2025 (reflecting 10 per cent constant-exchange-rate growth, with the USD figure affected by currency translation).
The workforce tells a similar story of measured growth. Ferring employed 6,000 people from 2020 through 2022, expanded to 7,000 in 2023, and reached 7,500 by 2025. These are not the numbers of a company pursuing growth at any cost. They are the numbers of a company that hires when it has something specific for new employees to do. The ratio of revenue to headcount has remained remarkably stable, suggesting that Ferring expands its commercial footprint and its workforce in tandem rather than overbuilding capacity ahead of demand.
Operations span more than 100 countries, but the company’s centre of gravity remains in Europe. Headquartered in Saint-Prex, Switzerland, with significant operations in Copenhagen (where the peptide science tradition runs deepest), Ferring maintains the operational profile of a European specialty company even as its products reach patients globally. The maternal health portfolio, which sits alongside reproductive medicine, extends Ferring’s mission beyond conception into pregnancy and delivery, making the company a presence across the full continuum from fertility treatment to neonatal care.
Sources: Ferring Pharmaceuticals annual disclosures 2020–2025. FDA approval records (REBYOTA BLA). OPPI member directory.