Granules India acquires Auctus Pharma for Rs 120 crore
Hyderabad based pharmaceutical major Granules India announced on Monday (November 4) that it had acquired the unlisted Hyderabad-based Auctus Pharma, a manufacturer of bulk drugs or active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) for Rs 120 crore. Granules India is a near-Rs 1,000 crore company, while Auctus Pharma has revenues of around Rs 100 crore.
Granules India Managing Director C Krishna Prasad said while his company was a leading supplier of products like Paracetamol, Metformin, Ibuprofen and Guaifenesin, the acquisition would help it expand this further.
Auctus’s product portfolio includes 12 APIs as well as key intermediates of those APIs. The APIs are in several therapeutic categories such as antihistaminic (to counter allergies), antihypertensive (to maintain the right blood pressure), antithrombotic (to prevent blood clots) and anticonvulsant (to combat epileptic seizures), and more. Auctus’s APIs and intermediates sell in 50 countries. The team and assets from the acquisition will initially operate as a separate division with Granules.
Granules India makes has a unique business model where it makes pharmaceutical formulation ingredients (PFIs) for its clients. PFIs provide everything that goes into a tablet without actually compressing the ingredients into one, bulk drugs or active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) as well as finished dosages (FDs) or tablets. Its clients include some of the leading global pharma majors, including GSK and Mylan.
The announcement on Monday follows the signing of an agreement to acquire Auctus Pharma. The acquisition process is expected to be completed in the next three to six months. Auctus has two manufacturing facilities, an API facility in Visakhapatnam’s Pharmacity and an intermediate facility in Hyderabad. The API facility has approvals from leading regulatory agencies including the US’s Food and Drugs Administration, European Directorate for Quality of Medicines, and equivalent regulatory bodies in Canada, Korea and the World Health Organization.
Granules also announced the opening of a new research and development (R&D) facility in Hyderabad. This will focus on full scale generic API development and supplement the company’s existing R&D facility in Pune which focuses on sustainable technology development.
“Auctus provides Granules with a meaningful API platform which has a US FDA approved site to strengthen our finished dosage division. Granules will offer tremendous value to customers since we can provide supply security all the way from key intermediates to finished dosages for these products. We will be a market leader by implementing our operational excellence philosophy while leveraging Auctus’ regulatory approvals. In order to accelerate growth with a sustainable development engine, we have established a new R&D facility to enable finished dosage filings for our new APIs” said Krishna Prasad.
Analysts however would want to see how Granules sustains the growth in revenues.
