Granules India to invest Rs 100 crore

HYDERABAD: Granules India is planning to invest Rs 100 crore this financial year to increase the capacity of its manufacturing facilities. This will help the pharma company to meet increased demand from multinational companies for finished dosages and pharmaceutical formulation intermediates (PFIs).

``We will increase our finished dosage capacity to 18 billion tablets a year from 6 billion. The expansion will be over by end of this financial year. We are also increasing PFI capacity to 15,000 tonnes from 8,000 tonnes a year,’’ said C Krishna Prasad, managing director, Granules India.

Over 60% of the funding for expansion will come from internal accruals while the rest from borrowing. The company’s debt equity combination stands at 0:0.42. The Hyderabad-based company also plans to bring down its dependency on active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) with the expansion.

``Outsourcing is gaining momentum as MNCs are increasingly looking at procuring finished dosages and PFIs from India. Considering that our plants on the outskirts of Hyderabad have received approvals from US, Europe and Australia it will be easy for us to get more orders,’’ he said.

Last financial year, finished dosages contributed 25% of the company’s Rs 476 crore revenues. This financial year, Granules expects this share to increase to 40% while the share of APIs will decrease from 37% to 30%.