Roche is the world's largest biotechnology company and the global leader in in-vitro diagnostics, and it is the only major healthcare group that operates both at scale under one roof. Founded in Basel in 1896, it generated CHF 61.5 billion of sales in 2025 across two divisions — Pharmaceuticals (CHF 47.7 billion) and Diagnostics (CHF 13.8 billion) — with a core operating margin of 35.5% and core EPS of CHF 19.46. Control rests with the founding Hoffmann and Oeri families, whose pooled voting block held 64.97% of the bearer shares at 31 December 2025, an ownership structure that underwrites an unusually long investment horizon: 39 consecutive dividend increases and CHF 12.2 billion of core R&D in 2025. Strategically, Roche is converting a legacy oncology franchise into a broader portfolio anchored in cancer, cardiovascular–metabolic disease (notably obesity) and neurology, while defending an installed diagnostics base against Chinese pricing reform and US trade and pricing policy.
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### What the company does
Roche discovers, develops, manufactures and commercialises prescription medicines and in-vitro diagnostic systems, assays and software. It is organised into two reporting divisions plus a Corporate centre. The Pharmaceuticals Division comprises Roche Pharmaceuticals (including the wholly owned US biotechnology business Genentech, based in South San Francisco) and Chugai Pharmaceutical of Japan, in which Roche Holding held 59.89% of issued shares and 61.12% of voting rights as of early 2025. The Diagnostics Division sells instruments, reagents, consumables and digital solutions to central laboratories, molecular laboratories, pathology laboratories and decentralised/near-patient settings, and includes Foundation Medicine (comprehensive genomic profiling), Ventana/Roche Tissue Diagnostics, Roche Diabetes Care and Roche Information Solutions.
Roche's own framing, per its FY2025 corporate boilerplate, is that it was founded in 1896 as one of the first industrial manufacturers of branded medicines and has become the world's largest biotechnology company and the global leader in in-vitro diagnostics, pursuing personalised healthcare by combining pharmaceuticals, diagnostics and clinical-practice data insights. Its investor materials state that the two divisions jointly focus on three disease areas expected to account for almost 50% of the global disease burden by 2035: cancer, cardiovascular–metabolic disease and neurological disease.
**Independent characterisation.** Roche is best understood as two structurally different businesses stapled together by a personalised-medicine thesis. Pharmaceuticals is a high-margin, patent-cliff-exposed innovation business: it earned a 49.2% core operating margin in 2025 on CHF 47.7 billion of sales and delivered CHF 19.5 billion of operating free cash flow, but its economics depend on replacing expiring franchises faster than biosimilars erode them. Diagnostics is a capital-intensive, razor-and-blade instrument-and-reagent business with far thinner economics — a 14.4% core operating margin in 2025, down 1.1 percentage points, and only CHF 0.7 billion of operating free cash flow on CHF 13.8 billion of sales after a 17% increase in capital expenditure. The strategic case for keeping them together (companion diagnostics, patient selection, real-world data) is real but has never been visible as a quantified margin premium in the segment disclosures. In practice, the Group's cash generation and valuation are driven overwhelmingly by Pharmaceuticals.
### Revenue model
Roche reports "Revenue" of CHF 63,356m for 2025 (sales of CHF 61,516m plus other revenue of CHF 1,840m). There is no subscription line; the closest analogue is the recurring reagent and service annuity generated by the installed diagnostics instrument base, which Roche does not disclose separately.
### Value chain position, customers and end markets
Roche is a fully integrated originator: it runs its own discovery organisations (pRED in Basel, gRED at Genentech, plus Chugai's independent research), its own late-stage development function under the Chief Medical Officer, its own biologics and device manufacturing network, and its own commercial affiliates in more than 100 countries. It supplements internal discovery with in-licensing and bolt-on M&A — CHF 4.8 billion of intangible assets were recognised in the Pharmaceuticals Division in 2025 from in-licensing, business combinations and asset acquisitions.
Customers are payers and reimbursement authorities (the economic buyer in most markets), hospital systems and specialist prescribers, central and reference laboratories, pathology laboratories, blood-screening organisations, retail pharmacy and, increasingly in the US, direct-to-consumer channels via the TrumpRx platform. End markets by therapeutic area in Pharmaceuticals for 2025 were Oncology/Haematology 50.2% of divisional sales, Neurology 20.6%, Immunology 14.1%, Ophthalmology 8.8% and other areas 6.3%.