The Hindu Business Line : Hikal eyes more acquisitions

"We are evaluating a couple of international companies," Mr Sameer Hiremath, Hikal's Executive Director, told Business Line. He said the company was looking to invest in companies that would strengthen its efforts to backward integrate and indicated that the deal would be wrapped up this fiscal.

Only last year, Hikal had acquired a 50.1 per cent holding in Danish pharmaceutical marketing company Marsing & Co.

Hikal is increasing its presence in the pharma business, which currently contributes about 35 per cent of its turnover. Recently, it commenced supplies of epilepsy drug Gabapentin in the US and expects to file about five Drug Master Files per year. This year, it has seen four years of its effort in the Japanese market fructify into an outsourcing deal with a Japanese trading company, he said.

Having got its pharmaceuticals business rolling, Hikal recently completed the integration of its business processes using Oracle applications, he said. The shopfloor is IT-compliant and the integration process took six-months. The next phase would be to link it into the plants, followed by the integration of the Danish company into this system at a later date, he said.

Besides strengthening Hikal's own distribution network in Europe, the Marsing deal has also helped Hikal market products of other Indian companies into European markets that they have not tapped, he said.

Hikal also has a wholly owned subsidiary, Bremer Pharma, in Germany, where it manufactures veterinary medications. The product mix is at present being rationalised, he said.

The company clocked consolidated revenue of Rs 341 crore, including seven months of Marsing's. It expects to touch Rs 500 crore by March 2006.

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