Ipca Laboratories carved a niche during Q2 of the current financial year 2002-03. On a net sale growth of 15.2 per cent, the company showed an increase of 126.5 per cent in pre-tax profits. However, the increase in net profit has been of the order of 83.2 per cent at Rs 19.91 crore. This was mainly due a substantial rise in effective rate of taxation from 8 per cent to 25.6 per cent during Q2. The effort taken by the company to depend largely on internal funding had resulted in heavy reduction of 46 per cent in interest charges in Q2. The operating margin improved from 16 per cent to 24.1 per cent mainly due to cost reduction. The net profit margin also scaled up from 9.6 per cent to 15.3 per cent.
During the first half of 2002-03, the company achieved net sales of Rs 249.99 crore which recorded an increase of 19.5 per cent over the corresponding period of previous year. The profit before tax at Rs 45.16 crore jacked up by 115.7 per cent while net profit showed only a growth of 90.9 per cent at Rs 34.53 crore. This indicated that the company had witnessed an excellent performance during Q1. The financial cost has been reduced substantially to Rs 4.01 crore from Rs 7.93 crore. There has been an impressive increase in operating margin from 16.4 per cent to 21.8 per cent. As a result, the net margin shot up from 8.6 per cent to 13.8 per cent during H1. The EPS is estimated at Rs 27.62 as compared to Rs 14.47 in the H1 of previous year.