Excluding the impact of foreign currency fluctuations, the company reported 9.8% service revenue growth, with 22.9% growth in its IHS segment and 5.5% growth in the product development segment.
CFO Kevin Gordon said the product development revenue growth was from an increase in clinical solutions and services provided on a functional resourcing basis, clinical trial support services and core clinical services throughout Asia and Japan.
CEO Tom Pike added that the net new business wins for the quarter represent a book-to-bill ratio of 1.23 times services revenues, and the company’s industry-leading backlog is now set at nearly $11.4bn.
“It's been a strong period of growth for biopharmaceutical services and we execute against an exciting backdrop,” Pike said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “More than 4,800 drugs are in the Phase I to III pipeline, up sequentially from the first quarter. Biotech funding is still at record levels on a quarter-to-quarter basis, [and] biotechs are becoming a bigger part of the R&D ecosystem for larger pharmaceutical firms.”
The market has resulted in “strong demand for services like ours,” and the opportunity pipeline for clinical services “remains strong,” he added.
The company also reported a strong mix of different clients as it does not have one customer that's more than 10% of revenue and 14 of its more than 550 clients do over $100m of business with Quintiles. The company has also looked to target new offerings to better support smaller biotech in both the West and in Asia, Pike added.
As far as the types of trials that Quintiles is seeing, Pike said the company continues “to see strength in oncology,” as well as with central nervous system studies, particularly in areas like Alzheimer’s.
“Given our 14 therapeutic areas, we probably have the widest expanse of types of trials going on in the industry. For instance, in the GI [Gastrointestinal] area, we're really strong and consistently win. So it's pretty broad, but we do lead in oncology,” he added.
As for the rest of the year, Quintiles updated its 2015 constant currency service revenue growth guidance to a range of 8.5% to 9.5%, compared to full-year 2014.
That guidance assumes the addition of approximately $80m of revenues for the second half of 2015 from the company’s JV with Quest Diagnostics. It also assumes the previously guided lower second-half revenue growth rates in IHS, compared to the first half of 2015.