World’s Top 10 Cord Blood Banks by Inventory

Table Legend: Units of the inventory are either cord blood (CB) alone, or cord blood plus cord tissue (CT).

Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation has been tracking the cord blood industry since 1998. We only issue reports once every few years, because it is very difficult to compile an accurate report. In this table, all of the inventories either come from shareholder reports of public companies or direct interviews with company executives. We do not accept inventory numbers or “Top 10” claims from press releases.

There is no single business model that dominates among the Top 10 banks: Some of them consolidate their processing in a single lab, whereas others use multiple labs. Some are active in a single nation and others are multi-national. There are banks whose growth has been augmented by multiple acquisitions, but also banks that have grown organically. For some of these banks the storage of cord tissue contributes significantly to their total inventory. None of the banks have significant contributions from cord blood units donated to the public inventory.

The total inventory in the Top 10 Banks is over 4 million units of cord blood and cord tissue. By comparison, the Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation estimates that the total inventory of all family cord blood banks around the world is over 6.75 million. Hence more than 60% of the world’s privately banked newborn stem cells are managed by these 10 companies. 

Over the past three years there have been many reports of consolidation in the cord blood industry. Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation finds that the number of operational family cord blood banks has only dropped by about 10% and is still close to 200 laboratories worldwide. There has been sweeping consolidation in the ownership of banks, with more banks joining banking “Groups”. When a bank joins a group, they usually close all their multi-national marketing offices that competed against the group, and some people have misinterpreted the large drop in marketing offices as a drop in “banks”.

These days, a cord blood bank must have an inventory over 200 thousand to compete for a place among the Top 10 Banks, and as these leading banks grow that threshold will go up.

* Footnote: LifeCell of India would be #3 at inventory 490000 in units CB+CT. However, current regulations in India prohibit private cord tissue banking, hence the table only shows their CB inventory.