Summary · why it matters
On the morning of September 17, MGI Tech extended its strength, opening 1.41% higher before quickly climbing, touching an intraday high of 68.83 yuan, with a maximum morning gain of 9.06%. As of the morning close, it stood at 66.40 yuan, up 5.21%. From the September 11 close of 54.32 yuan, the stock has gained 22.24% over four trading days. The broader market weakened this morning, with the Shanghai Composite Index down 0.36% and the Shenzhen Component Index down 0.29%, while the pharmaceutical and biotech sector rose 0.78% and medical devices gained 0.28%. MGI Tech led gains in both sectors, showing independent strength in a declining index environment. Capital flows showed net inflows across super-large, large, and medium orders, with only small orders seeing net outflows. On the news front, three threads point simultaneously to the AI drug discovery picks-and-shovels logic. First, on September 16, Novo Nordisk announced it would use Anthropic's Claude Science platform to accelerate new drug discovery, covering target prediction, molecule generation, and preclinical toxicity simulation. This is from the same lineage as the mRNA wave in August, when MGI Tech, as a picks-and-shovels player in the mRNA industry chain, hit the 20% daily limit on August 20 and rose another 8.22% against the trend on August 21, touching 80.50 yuan intraday. Second, GenScript provides protein expression, purification, and characterization services for Eli Lilly's TuneLab, and its AI-driven drug discovery business saw first-half revenue rise 105% year on year to about 40 million US dollars, with roughly 70% of raised funds directed to automated high-throughput wet laboratories. MGI Tech is a global pioneer among upstream life science companies in integrating three major technology platforms: full-read-length sequencing, intelligent automation, and multi-omics. It holds agent-ready automation products such as PrepALL, AlphaTool, and the AIO all-in-one system, serves more than 3,800 users worldwide, and its intelligent automation business has delivered end-to-end million-sample throughput in national-level projects such as the Beijing Brain Institute's dark laboratory. Third, Novoprotein hit the 20% daily limit today with turnover of 614 million yuan, marking two limit-up moves within four trading days. On the same day, MGI Tech announced that its subsidiary YongSheng Intelligence had reached a strategic cooperation with Changzhou Boyi Biotech, focusing on intelligent protein purification. YongSheng Intelligence relies on its self-developed ProtoPilot self-evolving multi-agent system to push protein purification from traditional automation toward an AI-driven autonomous leap. China Merchants Securities assesses that continued upstream capital investment, midstream general-purpose large models entering drug discovery scenarios, and downstream demand for high-quality wet-lab validation mean AI computing power and wet-lab validation are likely to jointly form the infrastructure of AI drug discovery, namely the picks and shovels.
Genscript Biotech Corp
Eli Lilly and Company
Novo Nordisk A/S
MGI Tech Co. Ltd. A
China Merchants Securities Co Ltd
Suzhou Novoprotein Scientific Co. Ltd. A