Aarti Drugs Ltd (ADL), a Rs.1,000 crore plus Mumbai based pharma major, has improved its financial performance during the quarter ended June 2014 and its net profit moved up to Rs.17.24 crore from Rs.11.84 crore in the same quarter of last year. Its net sales also improved by 18.8 per cent to Rs.259.60 crore from Rs.218.59 crore. With improvement in profits, its EPS worked out to Rs.14.24 as against Rs.9.78 in the last period.
ADL has capital expenditure plans worth more than Rs.150 crore for coming 18 months for constructing new facilities, few of which are expected to start giving production output from 2014-15. These will cater to ever increasing antibiotic, antidiarrhoeal & anti-inflammatory segments. ADL has installed new plant at Sarigam (GIDC), which will cater anti-diabetic segment and will increase it's current capacity from 100 metric tons per month (TPM) to 600 TPM. The plant is already operational and will contribute to incremental revenues for the year 2014-15.
ADL management expects to address concerns arising out of US FDA warning letter received in July'13 in the year 2014-15. It has taken necessary corrective/remedial actions after consulting US FDA consultant which satisfied to the US FDA authorities and expect a re-audit soon. ADL did suffer a setback on account of this in the year 2013-14, which is expected to be recouped in the year 2014-15. However, other facilities of ADL continues to maintain cGMP certifications like COFEPRIS, ANVISA, TGA, WHO GMP and ISO resulting in 22.8 per cent growth of export sales in the year 2013-14.
ADL is operating two state-of-the art R&D centres, at Tarapur, which are recognized by Department of Science and Industry Research, Government of India, and third one at Turbhe, Navi Mumbai. However, for better operational convenience and faster R&D throughput, company is planning to to consolidate all three R&D centres into a single umbrella structure at one central location in Tarapur. ADL plans to launch more products in ‘Fluoroquinolones' series, making it one of the strongest in anti-biotic segment.