Hovione Names António Almeida and Marco Gil Co-CEOs as Jean-Luc Herbeaux Steps Down on 21 May After Three-Year Run — Both Incoming Executives Carry 19-Year Tenures and the Permanent CEO Search Is Already Open

The Hovione board has activated a two-person co-CEO bridge at the top of the Portuguese pharmaceutical contract-development-and-manufacturing group, replacing Jean-Luc Herbeaux on 21 May 2026 after a three-year tenure. The departure is filed as por motivos pessoais in the board communication carried by Jornal de Negócios Sunday evening. Herbeaux will remain inside the group through 30 September 2026 to run a structured transition handover, and the board has simultaneously opened a permanent CEO search to land a single replacement during the co-CEO interim. The two incoming executives — António Almeida, the current Chief Financial Officer, and Marco Gil, the Senior Vice-President for Sales and Marketing — both joined Hovione in 2007 and carry roughly nineteen years of group tenure into the chief-executive seat.

The succession sits inside the longer arc of Hovione governance. Herbeaux took the CEO seat in 2022, succeeding Guy Villax after a quarter-century run at the top of the family-rooted CDMO. The Villax succession in 2022 was the first non-family chief executive in the group's modern era and ran on an external-pharma-veteran profile — Herbeaux had served in senior roles at major European pharmaceutical groups before joining Hovione. The Almeida-Gil bridge restores the long-tenured-insider model to the seat, with both executives describing a profile that the board has publicly characterised as profundo conhecimento do negócio and sólida experiência operacional. The combination is a hold-the-ship signal to the customer base, the regulators and the financing partners during the search window.

What the Co-CEO Bridge Actually Does

Co-CEO arrangements at the top of a CDMO of Hovione's scale are unusual in European pharmaceutical manufacturing but not unprecedented — the model is typically deployed when the board needs operating continuity while running a search rather than a permanent dual-leadership commitment. The structural questions for the next four to six months — the search-window timing the board has flagged — sit in three categories:

• Customer-contract continuity. Hovione's revenue stack runs through long-cycle development-and-manufacturing contracts with global pharmaceutical companies — the typical engagement runs from API process development through phase-III scale-up and into commercial supply, with multi-year fixed-capacity-and-pricing terms. A CEO transition mid-cycle on any major contract is read carefully by the contracting partner, and the co-CEO signal — with the CFO and the SVP Sales already inside the relationship for nineteen years — is calibrated for that audience first.
• Capital-allocation cadence. Hovione is in the middle of a multi-year capex programme across its Portuguese (Sete Casas, Loures), Irish (Cork), American (East Windsor, New Jersey) and Chinese (Macau) manufacturing footprints, with the spray-drying-and-inhalation-delivery technology lines absorbing the bulk of the investment envelope. The CFO seat carries the capital-allocation cadence under the co-CEO model, and the board's choice of Almeida as one of the two co-CEOs reads as a signal that the capex programme runs through the transition unchanged.
• Regulatory-and-quality cadence. CDMO operations sit under continuous regulatory oversight from the EMA, the FDA and the equivalent agencies in every market the group ships to. The quality-and-regulatory function reports through the operational organisation rather than through the CEO directly, so the day-to-day audit-and-inspection cadence is insulated from the leadership change — but board-level regulatory representation in the major-issue escalation path runs through the chief executive. The co-CEO model splits that responsibility between Almeida and Gil for the bridge window.

Who Almeida and Gil Are

António Almeida has held the Chief Financial Officer seat at Hovione through the recent capex-and-financing cycle, with responsibility for the group's capital structure, the financing partnerships with the European Investment Bank and the commercial-bank syndicate, the treasury function across the four-country operational perimeter, and the financial-reporting cadence to the family-and-institutional shareholder base. The CFO seat at a private CDMO of Hovione's scale carries the weight of the public-company-equivalent financial-disclosure cadence — buyers and lenders demand audit-grade reporting and the metrics-tracking framework that drives multi-year contract pricing. Almeida joined Hovione in 2007 and has held the CFO seat through the closing chapter of the Villax era and the entirety of the Herbeaux period.

Marco Gil sits at the head of the commercial organisation as Senior Vice-President for Sales and Marketing — the customer-facing relationship function that originates and renews the long-cycle contracts that anchor the revenue stack. The role at a CDMO is structurally different from a sales seat at a branded-pharma producer: the unit of negotiation is the multi-year capacity-and-pricing envelope rather than the single-product list price, and the relationship-management cadence runs at the C-suite level inside each contracting partner. Gil also joined the group in 2007, and has built the commercial relationship base that spans the major-pharma client portfolio.

Both executives report into the bridge co-CEO seat from 21 May, with the existing functional-leadership organisation reporting up through them. The board communication does not indicate which of the two will hold the Chairman-of-the-Executive-Committee role for representational purposes, suggesting the co-CEO model is genuinely co-equal rather than a soft-elevation arrangement.

The Permanent-CEO Search Window

The board's parallel decision to open a permanent CEO search alongside the co-CEO appointment frames the bridge as time-limited. The typical European-pharma-CEO search cadence runs to four to nine months from open to close — the executive-search firms running these mandates typically lead a structured candidate-identification, interview-and-assessment process that lands an offer inside half a year, with the on-boarding window adding another two to three months. The Herbeaux 30 September departure date sits comfortably inside the upper end of that envelope, and the board has the option of either landing a single permanent CEO before that date (in which case the co-CEO bridge dissolves into a normal CEO-plus-CFO-and-SVP-Sales structure) or running the bridge through the Herbeaux exit and into the autumn while the search runs to ground.

The candidate-profile signal the board is sending — an inside-the-business operator with regulated-pharma-CDMO depth — sits at the senior-VP-level inside the major-pharma multinationals and at the CEO-level inside the smaller CDMO peers. Whether the eventual permanent CEO comes from inside (with the co-CEO model elevating one of Almeida or Gil) or from outside (with both returning to their existing functional seats under a new chief executive) is the structural question the search will resolve.

Hovione Inside the Portuguese Pharma Cluster

Hovione is one of the two largest Portuguese-rooted pharmaceutical groups by global revenue and the single largest CDMO in the country. Founded in 1959 by Diogo Villax — Guy Villax's father — the group built its modern footprint around two technology platforms: spray drying for solid amorphous dispersions (the formulation technology that enables poorly-water-soluble small-molecule drugs to be delivered orally) and inhalation-and-nasal-delivery development-and-manufacturing for respiratory therapies. The combination puts the group inside the value chain of several of the highest-growth therapeutic categories in modern pharmaceuticals — the spray-dry platform is the manufacturing backbone for a generation of cystic-fibrosis and oncology therapies, and the inhalation platform sits inside the next wave of respiratory and intranasal CNS therapeutics.

The Portuguese operational footprint is anchored at Sete Casas, Loures — the original Hovione site, which combines API manufacturing with spray-drying-and-particle-engineering capacity. The Lisbon-metro location matters for the Portuguese pharmaceutical-cluster argument: Hovione, Bial (the Trofa-based group that built its modern profile around the epilepsy product eslicarbazepine acetate), and the Generis generic-and-specialty franchise inside the Aurobindo group together carry the bulk of the Portuguese pharmaceutical industrial footprint, alongside the CDMO operations of Atral Cipan, Iberfar and the contract-manufacturing-and-packaging tier behind them. The cluster sits inside the broader Portuguese chemical-and-pharmaceutical industrial perimeter that prints just under 4% of national gross value added.

The Herbeaux era took the group through the closing phase of the Villax-period capex cycle and into the next investment envelope — the Cork manufacturing expansion, the Macau spray-drying line, the continuous-tableting-and-particle-engineering capacity at Loures, and the New Jersey commercial-supply build-out. The Almeida-Gil bridge inherits the run-through of that capex commitment and the management of the financing partnerships behind it. The European Investment Bank's pharma-CDMO financing line has been a recurring source of capital for the group through the recent cycle; the commercial-bank syndicate behind the working-capital and the long-term-financing facility runs through the major Portuguese-and-international banks.

The Villax Family and the Ownership Structure

Hovione is privately held. The Villax family remains the largest single shareholder block through the family-investment-vehicle structure that succeeded the founder generation, and a tail of institutional and family-office investors sits below them on the cap table. Guy Villax stepped out of the CEO seat in 2022 but retained his board role, providing the continuity that has anchored every chief-executive transition in the modern era — including the Herbeaux period and the upcoming Almeida-Gil bridge. The family's strategic posture has been consistent across the recent decade: continued reinvestment in the technology platforms, deliberate expansion of the geographic manufacturing footprint, and a deferred-IPO-or-trade-sale calendar that has been signalled as an eventual possibility without ever sitting in active execution.

The succession question for the family inside the longer arc is how the permanent CEO selection — whether Almeida, Gil, an internal third candidate, or an external operator — fits inside the broader exit-or-continuation calculus on the ownership side. A co-CEO bridge with two long-tenured operators reads as a continuation signal: the family is investing in continuity through a turbulent transition rather than positioning the chief-executive seat for an external takeover or trade-sale process. The permanent-CEO search profile that emerges through the autumn will be the cleanest read on the medium-term ownership trajectory.

Why This Matters for the Wider Portuguese Industrial Read

Hovione's leadership transition lands inside the most pressured external environment for European-resident pharmaceutical manufacturing in years. The Trump-administration pharmaceutical tariff package — covered in the Dinheiro Vivo reporting Sunday on the early-2026 effect on Portuguese pharmaceutical exports — has reshaped the cost calculus for European-headquartered CDMOs supplying the US market. Hovione's New Jersey operational footprint partially insulates the group from the most direct tariff exposure (US-manufactured product is not subject to US import tariffs on European-manufactured product), but the cross-border value-chain — the spray-drying-and-particle-engineering activity at Loures feeding finished-product manufacturing into the US market — remains exposed at the margin. The new co-CEO team inherits the working-through of that exposure as one of the immediate-priority items.

The Portuguese pharmaceutical export base has been one of the more resilient industrial-export segments through the recent cycle — the value-add per kilogram of product shipped runs at the high end of the Portuguese export distribution, and the cluster has been a consistent positive contributor to the trade-balance line. The first-quarter 2026 effect of the Trump tariff package on the segment, captured in the Dinheiro Vivo reporting, will be one of the early structural tests of the Almeida-Gil bridge: whether the group's commercial relationships can absorb the price-and-volume shock without material slippage in the multi-year-contract pricing envelope.

What This Means for Expats

• Hovione is one of the largest private-sector industrial employers in the Lisbon metro area. The Sete Casas (Loures) site carries thousands of jobs, with a significant share in engineering, regulatory, quality and commercial functions that are accessible to skilled foreign hires. The leadership transition does not in itself change the hiring cadence — but a co-CEO bridge typically pauses major reorganisation announcements until the permanent CEO lands. Job-search candidates inside the group should not expect a structural change before the autumn.
• The Portuguese pharma cluster is one of the cleanest skilled-immigration stories in the country. The combination of Hovione, Bial, Generis and the CDMO tier underneath them supports a recurring intake of foreign-trained chemists, biologists, pharmaceutical-engineering graduates and regulatory specialists. The sector is one of the EU Blue Card and Visto para Procura de Trabalho destinations that consistently absorbs candidates through the AIMA process covered in the recent family-reunification and work-permit guides.
• Pharmaceutical exports drive part of the Portuguese trade-balance dynamic. The Trump tariff package's first-quarter effect on Portuguese pharma exports (per Dinheiro Vivo) is one of the structural reasons the Q1 trade-balance numbers have come in below the prior-year baseline. Expat consumers do not see this in retail prices — Portuguese pharmaceutical retail is dominated by the European-supply chain — but the macro effect is visible in the deficit numbers and the spring forecast that the European Commission's Spring 2026 release will land on 21 May.
• Healthcare-system pharmacy supply is unrelated. The Hovione transition does not affect SNS or private-pharmacy supply of finished pharmaceutical products — Hovione's commercial output runs to global pharmaceutical companies, not directly to Portuguese pharmacies. Retail-pharmacy supply chains run through the major Portuguese distributors (Alliance Healthcare, OCP Portugal, Cofanor) and the European supply-chain framework, which sit outside the Hovione perimeter.

Sources

• Jornal de Negócios — Com Jean-Luc Herbeaux de saída, Hovione escolhe António Almeida e Marco Gil para co-CEO (11 May 2026)
• Hovione — Corporate website
• Dinheiro Vivo — Efeito 'tarifas Trump' nas farmacêuticas arrasa com exportações portuguesas no início de 2026 (11 May 2026)