Cipla in talks to add new customers for its China factory, executive says

Indian drugmaker Cipla is looking to add at least two new overseas markets for its products manufactured in China, as the firm seeks to work around constrained production capacity in India, a senior executive told Reuters.

India's third-largest drugmaker by sales started operations at its factory making inhalation respule products in Jiangsu province, eastern China, in 2024 to supply the U.S. market.

"Sometimes we face capacity restrictions ... so they (customers) do approach us whether we can handle the supplies," Deepak Hegde, Cipla's general manager for China, told Reuters.


He said the company was in talks with "at least two or three different countries", for product shipments from China and those discussions began around six or eight months ago.

He declined to say how much it had supplied to the United States from the Chinese manufacturing site or name the other countries it was in discussions with.

The Chinese site can produce about 55 million units annually of products used in inhalers, Hegde said. (Reporting by Andrew Silver. Editing by Miyoung Kim and Mark Potter)