Advanced Enzymes Technologies Limited (AETL), a biotechnology company headquartered in Mumbai, is expanding its fermentation plant at its 10-acre land in Pithampur, Indore at a total investment of Rs 100 crore. The company has already started with its expansion process in its Pithampur plant. The expansion will be in two phases of recovery and formulation, of which the first phase is already complete.

The company had acquired the 10-acre land at Pitampur three years back and has till now invested nearly Rs 25 to 30 crore on it. The expansion is divided into two phased of which the company has already completed the first phase of the recovery part and has started with the second phase of expansion. They will be further churning out about Rs 50 to 60 crore for expansion and this is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Apart from the fermentation facility at Pitampur which is undergoing expansion, the company has another manufacturing plant located in Nasik, Maharashra. Apart from these two facilities, they have three other formulation plants at Nashik, Vasind and Vapi. They have a research lab at Thane near Mumbai that focuses on front end research or application research.

Speaking about the future plans of the company, C L Rathi, managing director, AETL informed that the company is looking towards expanding its reach to other countries as well through partnering for manufacturing operations and marketing purposes. He expressed his interests in collaborating with companies in Europe, Africa, Australia, China and the SAARC region. In fact they have recently opened office in Bangladesh and are in advanced level talks with a company in China, details of which he refused to give.

The company's research activities are focused on two segments i.e. healthcare and processing industries. In healthcare, the focus is on human, animal and plant healthcare. About 68 to 70 per cent of their sales come from human healthcare and about 15 percent comes from the animal healthcare. At present the company gets about Rs 85 crore from their business in India alone and around Rs 30 crore from exports to other countries.

The company has its reach in about 59 countries across the world. Rathi informed that the company expects their export to grow by 50 percent in the coming year increasing their revenue from export to Rs 60 crore from the Rs 30 crore last year. AETL invests nearly eight to 10 percent of its sales into new enzyme development and application activities to develop a full spectrum of industrial enzymes that primarily originate from biological systems which help reduce costs and improve the output quality. Last year the company invested eight percent of their total sales of Rs 115 crore in the R&D. AETL had started applying for patents not more than three year's back and from then on it has filed about 13 patents till now. Patents for five products have already been granted and they are expecting to get the clearance for the rest soon.

AETL was established in 1989 by C L Rathi, with a view to provide products that derived from enzymes. The production at AETL is absolutely indigenous and it is one of the few global companies which produce the full spectrum of enzymes derived from all four natural origins viz. Plant, Vegetable, Fungi and Bacteria. Both solid state and submerged culture techniques of fermentation are put into practice thereby producing a wide range of enzymes like cellulases, amylases, proteases, pancreatin, trypsin, serratiopeptidase, etc.