Biocon to maintain 20% sales, 15% profits growth

Q: The market usually takes Bonus as a sign of confidence from the management, is that what you are feeling going into 2009, or do you think it will be a challenging year?

A: We have a very strong financial base and the bonus issue certainly is towards the strong interest this stock is beginning to garner. We believe we need to create greater market liquidity, and you can see from our numbers that we have delivered the highest profits ever and we are very confidently looking at the year ahead, some of the investments that we had made, over the last 18 months are beginning to become very important for leveraging and delivering on certain growth trajectories.

We have created some very strong spring boards which will deliver the growth trajectories in the short medium and long term, so we are beginning to build up a very strong business portfolio, of very balanced and diversified set of business verticals.

A: I don't think we are hiving off cardiology, we have set up a new division. We felt that we had a combined in terms of our retail and branded formulations business. We had 3 divisions so far, which was cardio-diabetes, nephrology and oncology, and what we felt was that, it's important to separate cardiology and diabetes largely because we wanted to put a much stronger focus on our Insugen led diabetes portfolio. 

We felt that cardiology now requires separate attention because we think there is a large growth trajectory which is latent and needs to be unleashed, riding on the strength of not only the statons or our statics products but we also have other products in the pipeline like stirptocynes and other products in cardiology that need to get a special focus.

So that's what we have done and we think that our formulations business is going to deliver a good growth number next year. In terms of research services this year, we have really made a huge investment in ramping up and this is going to be delivered by the numbers next year, that is in the current fiscal.

A: You have seen our numbers this year and in fact our bio-pharmaceutical business has delivered very robustly this year and that's what has helped us to meet and deliver very strong profit numbers this year. The Bio Pharmaceutical business is clearly a business that is beginning to show stability in terms of pricing. This is largely on account of the fact that there has been strong growth in some of the APIs businesses that we have focused on.

I think we have also seen prices stabilizing because of some factors that have contributed from this from the China competition, one is of course that the Chinese pricing has stabilized largely because of the fact that the incentives and export kinds of incentives that the Chinese government was giving, has been withdrawn and normalized the kind of global export markets. Then there is this fear factor of the quality issues pertaining to Chinese products which has also helped Indian companies to take advantage of that, so all in all, we are seeing a good stabilization of prices.

A: Yes and certainly we are still very focused on that and it is not about de-merging Syngene but it's about the listing, and we are still very focused on that objective. We are just waiting for the markets to open up and we hope to be able to list Syngene during this fiscal.

A: You can see that, this year we generated a top line growth of 20% and a bottom line growth of 13 to 15% and these are the kind of numbers we will try and sustain.