OXB employed 1,017 at the end of June, its highest in five years, and credits UK hiring. Half-year sales hit £79.8m, but just 1.5% came from UK clients.

Oxford Biomedica employed 1,017 people across the group at the end of June, 117 more than a year earlier, and the company says the extra wage bill comes from hiring in the UK. That is the largest workforce the Cowley-based firm has reported in the five years its last annual report sets out.

The figure is in the interim results the company published to the London Stock Exchange on Tuesday 22 September. They cover the six months to 30 June 2026.

OXB, as the business now trades, is registered at Windrush Court on Transport Way, about 200 metres from the Mini plant. Companies House records the address and gives the company number as 03252665. The company describes itself in the results as “a global quality and innovation-led cell and gene therapy CDMO” and as a FTSE 250 constituent. In plain terms it makes viral vectors, the delivery systems that carry gene therapies into a patient’s cells, on contract for other companies rather than selling medicines of its own.

The headcount is the local number

The results put group headcount at 1,017 at the half year, against 900 at the same point in 2025. The average across the six months was 1,004, up from 895.

Set against the five-year table in the company’s 2025 annual report, filed at Companies House on 1 June, that is a record:

  • 2021: 815 at the year end
  • 2022: 904
  • 2023: 714
  • 2024: 861
  • 2025: 986
  • 30 June 2026: 1,017

Where are the new people? The results do not give a country breakdown of staff, and we should not pretend otherwise. But the company explains one of its cost increases like this: “Manpower-related costs have increased by £0.3 million related to the increase in UK headcount to support the higher revenue base and output in the second half of 2026.”

The only redundancies disclosed in the period were in the United States. OXB booked £0.7m of one-off costs for “redundancies associated with ceasing GMP manufacturing at the Bedford, MA site”, after moving that work to a plant it bought in Durham, North Carolina. Bedford now does development work instead.

In Oxfordshire the direction was the other way. The company says it completed planned increases in manufacturing capacity in the UK during the half year by refitting existing suites and changing shift patterns, and that it delivered a scale-up of quality control and more laboratory space for development work.

£79.8m of sales, and almost none of it British

Revenue rose 9% to £79.8m, from £73.2m. On a constant currency basis, which strips out exchange-rate movement, it rose 10% to £80.2m. That is the number the wire services led on.

The more interesting figure for anyone in Oxford is in note 4, which splits the revenue by where the client is:

Bar chart showing Oxford Biomedica's first-half revenue by client location: United States £66.5m, Europe £11.9m, United Kingdom £1.2m, rest of world £0.2m

  • United States: £66,516,000, 83% of the total
  • Europe: £11,877,000, 15%
  • United Kingdom: £1,206,000, 1.5%
  • Rest of the world: £246,000

A company with Oxford in its name, 1,017 staff and five leasehold sites in the county earned £1.2m from British customers in six months. That was less than the £1.4m it took from them a year earlier. Almost everything made here is sold abroad.

Two clients dominate. The note records £42.0m of manufacturing services revenue and £14.2m of development services revenue arising from sales to the two largest, each of which contributed more than 10% of group revenue. On those figures that is £56.2m, or 70% of everything the company earned in the half. A year ago the equivalent pair accounted for £39.7m, or 54%. The results do not say who they are. They do name Bristol Myers Squibb as the counterparty to a new commercial supply agreement for lentiviral vectors supporting its CAR-T portfolio.

It is still losing money

The good half-year numbers sit on top of a loss, and a wider one.

  • Operating loss: £29.1m, against £23.6m a year earlier
  • Loss before tax: £36.2m, against £26.0m
  • Loss per share: 30.39p, against 25.35p
  • Gross margin: 37%, down from 43%
  • Cash: £75.3m at 30 June, down from £96.9m at the end of December. It was £66.8m at 31 August

Part of the widening is a £7.6m write-down of plant and equipment in France, where the company says near-term revenue will be lower than it had expected. It drew a further $15m in March under a loan facility from Oaktree Capital Management, which runs to a principal of $125m.

The measure the company prefers, adjusted operating EBITDA, improved to a loss of £2.5m from £3.9m. It reiterated its guidance: £180m to £200m of constant currency revenue for 2026, revenue growth of 25% to 30% in 2027, and about £500m of revenue by 2030.

One number went the wrong way and was not in any headline. The revenue backlog, the value of work clients have signed a financial commitment for, was about £193m at 30 June. At 31 December it was about £204m.

Dr Frank Mathias, the chief executive, said OXB “delivered a strong first half commercially, with record new client wins, an increase in programmes to 59 and continued revenue growth”. Seventeen new clients signed in the half, more than the whole of 2025, and four more since.

The five Oxfordshire buildings, and what the leases say

Buried in the provisions note is the clearest signal of how long the company expects to stay. OXB holds a £7.578m provision for dilapidations, the cost of putting leasehold buildings back as it found them. The note names the properties and the years their leases end:

Site Lease ends
Oxbox 2033
Wallingford warehouse 2037
Windrush Court 2037
Yarnton 2036
Harrow House 2037

The Wallingford warehouse is about 12 miles south of Oxford, and the 2025 annual report puts it at 45,000 square feet. All five leases run past 2032.

One entry has moved. The 2025 annual report, signed in March, gave the Harrow House lease as ending in 2033. Six months later the same note in the same company’s accounts gives 2037. The results do not explain the change. The same note says £1.5m of the company’s cash relates to improvement works at Harrow House agreed under a sale and leaseback arrangement. Until OXB says otherwise, the plain reading is that the lease on that building now runs four years longer than it did in March.

Rent is rising. Lease payments across the group came to £8.8m in the half, up from £5.6m, which the company attributes to the new Durham site and to a 2025 rent review on Oxbox.

What it means for you

If you are looking for work there, the front door is narrow right now. On 22 September the company’s own job board listed seven vacancies across the whole group. One was in Oxford, for an MSAT data lead. Two were at Illkirch in France, one at Bedford, one at Durham, and two were home-based sales roles. A growing headcount and a short vacancy list are not a contradiction: much biotech recruitment happens through agencies and referrals rather than a public board. But the board is what you can apply to today.

If you are early in a career, the apprenticeship route is the one to watch. The company ran 16 apprenticeships in 2025 and says one of them completed a Master of Research Scientist from Aston University. It also attended the OxLEP Careers Fest that March.

If you already work there, turnover is falling. Voluntary staff turnover was 10.7% in 2025, down from 14.2% in 2024.

If you are reading this as a measure of the Oxford economy, be careful with it. The 1,017 is a group figure covering the UK, France and two sites in the United States, not a count of Oxford jobs, and nothing in these results tells you how many of them are in the city. For local employment the better guide remains the monthly claimant count, which stood at 3,095 in Oxford in July, and the Oxford house prices series that sets what those wages have to cover.

Its next set of accounts, covering the year to 31 December 2026, is due at Companies House by 30 June 2027. The 2026 annual general meeting was held at Windrush Court on 7 May.

Sources