Amino acid APIs cover pharmaceutical-grade, food-grade and other categories, among which pharmaceutical-grade products are the core raw materials for monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, injections, etc., and are also widely used in special medical food, health care products and other fields, and the industry growth is resilient.
1. Market size: Steady expansion, emerging scenarios open up incremental space
The domestic pharmaceutical amino acid market size will be about 12 billion yuan in 2023 and is expected to exceed 18 billion yuan in 2025, with a compound growth rate of about 12.8% from 2025 to 2030. From the perspective of demand structure, the pharmaceutical field accounts for 65% of the core applications, and the average annual consumption of pharmaceutical-grade amino acids such as L-glutamine and L-arginine in biopharmaceutical production has grown by more than 15%. Special medical food has become an important growth point, with 38% of the products containing amino acid formulas approved in 2023, and the annual demand in this field is expected to exceed 100,000 tons in 2030. In addition, the field of functional health care products is also expanding rapidly under the promotion of policies, and is expected to form a new market capacity of more than 3 billion yuan.
2. Competitive landscape: high concentration, leading industrial chain integration
The industry is highly centralized, with the top five companies (Huaheng Biotech, Meihua Biotech, Fufeng Group, etc.) accounting for more than 40% of the market share. Leading enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency through vertical integration of the industrial chain, such as the 50,000 tons/year L-valine project invested by Huaheng Biotech in 2024, accounting for 15% of the global specialty amino acid market; Relying on the advantages of corn deep processing, Meihua Biotech and Fufeng Group have stably laid out bulk amino acid production capacity and controlled the cost initiative. In terms of regional layout, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta concentrate more than 60% of the country's high-end amino acid production capacity, while the central and western regions undertake the transfer of bulk production capacity, forming industrial clusters with a clear division of labor. In terms of localization, import substitution has achieved remarkable results, with the proportion of amino acid raw material imports dropping from 45% in 2020 to 28% in 2025.
3. Cost and technology: Green technology solves the pain points, and there are still gaps in high-end categories
The cost side is greatly affected by the price fluctuations of upstream corn, soybeans and other agricultural products, and the capacity utilization rate of amino acids in corn deep processing will reach 85% in 2023, while the popularization of green processes such as enzyme catalysis and microbial fermentation will reduce the unit cost by nearly 20%. At the technical level, synthetic biology has promoted industry change, with strain modification increasing the fermentation efficiency of L-tryptophan and other products by 40% and reducing production costs by 30%; In 2025, Jinda Wei Group will achieve large-scale production of 99.9% high-purity L-proline, breaking the international monopoly. However, challenges still exist, with 70% dependence on imports of high-end categories such as cyclic amino acids and unnatural amino acids, and core technologies such as directional evolution and artificial intelligence-assisted enzyme design need to be broken through urgently.