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Price to Cost-of-raw-materials Ratio (PC) of biomanufacturing: definition and application
ZHANG Yi-Heng P. Job, CHEN Xuemei, SHI Ting
Synthetic Biology Journal    2025, 6 (1): 8-17.   DOI: 10.12211/2096-8280.2024-072
Abstract   (890 HTML120 PDF(pc) (3064KB)(634)  

Biomanufacturing is one of the strategic emerging industries in China during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period. The author once proposed “Tao-Fa-Shu-Qi” for the industrial biomanufacturing and provided its philosophical guideline. Focusing on the “Fa” of biological manufacturing and further analyzing the concept of “Fa as rules” in biomanufacturing, the author first proposed the concept of “Price to Cost-of-raw-materials Ratio” (PC value), which is the ratio of product market price to cost with raw materials. Biomanufactured products can be categorized by PC value into high-value products, value-added products, biocommodity, and products for public good. The PC value is a key indicator for evaluating the technological capability and economic viability of biomanufactured products. It is simple, transparent, and publicly accessible, offering a new approach for categorizing biomanufactured products. This indicator aids in guiding new technologies towards pathways of efficiency enhancement and cost reduction, forecasting future manufacturing costs and market prices for bioproducts, and assessing the industrialization potential of emerging biotechnologies. This article focuses on the biomanufacturing of fructose syrup, fructose solution, crystalline fructose, allulose, myo-inositol, and tagatose as examples, analyzing pathways for developing new technologies and predicting their economic feasibility. The calculation and analysis of the PC value could provide a new methodological tool for the top-level strategic design of the future development of emerging biomanufacturing industries, and could effectively facilitate the high-quality development of the bioeconomy.


Fig. 4 Assessing the commercialization potential of a new technology
Extracts from the Article
其次,初始PC值超过1的新制造技术具备基本的经济可行性,但新技术并不必然拥有光明的产业化前景。这是因为原料成本决定了成本底限(PC = 1),也是新技术发展的生死线。在生物制造领域,不存在摩尔定律所描述的指数级成本下降,技术演进推动制造成本线性下降才是普遍共识。产品市场规模扩大,竞争加剧,也引发市场价格不断走低。在生物制造领域,竞争者初始PC值越高,就越有可能穿越行业周期,直至技术成熟、市场竞争格局稳定,在此期间PC值低于1的技术将被淘汰出局(图4)。高PC值的高值产品、增值产品有更多技术发展路径并行的可能性,这些技术可以在原料成本与制造成本中寻求平衡,突破更快、成本更低的制造工艺技术也有可能弥补原料成本相对高的缺点,进而抢占市场份额。低PC值的大宗产品通常已构建稳定、完整的产业链,新的竞争者对廉价原料替换、得率提升等在内的原料端革新势在必行,仅依靠改进制造过程的工艺技术几乎不可能存在现实的产业化前景。
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