Supporting its, recent joint venture and MoUs, Granules India Limited, a Hyderabad-based leading pharmaceutical formulation intermediates company is planning to create marketing subsidiaries in Panama and UK.

Disclosing the initiative to Pharmabiz, N Vaidyanathan, general manager (Business Development), Granules India Limited, said, "We are planning to create a stronger marketing and logistics presence worldwide and to this end, we are looking at creating marketing subsidiaries in Panama which can serve Latin America and Brazil and in the United Kingdom to serve Europe and Africa".

The subsidiaries will be fully owned entities like the Granules USA and the company is expecting these subsidiaries to be operational by April this year. "We are creating a mechanism whereby we create responsibility centres at geographical level within the company so as to get the maximum advantage of a streamlined supply chain," Vaidyanathan added.

"These subsidiaries will help us get closer to the customers and will further accelerate the pace towards our goal of managing customer supply chains more effectively", he said.

Recently, the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with PharmaMatch, a Netherlands based pharmaceutical company to jointly develop, manufacture and market formulations in the European market. "In terms of volumes, we expect this MoU to result in a capacity utilisation of about 15 per cent of our current installed capacity and will further speed up the approval of our new finished dosages facility", he said.

The company's finished dosage facility is being developed near Hyderabad to support 18 billion tablets per annum at an estimated investment of US$ 15-17 million, which will be ready in June this year. "We are currently, putting up equipment for 6 billion tablets and are planning to put up the additional equipment as the capacity gets filled up," Vaidyanathan said.

During the year, the company has received Metformin ANDA approval by the FDA based on the PFI DMF, and has established a branch office in United Kingdom apart from signing of a master services agreement with GSK.

The GSK agreement will enable the company to undertake development projects on behalf of GSK Consumer Healthcare and with this it (Granules) will be part of the pipeline of the Consumer Healthcare wing of GSK.

"Against this agreement, GSK will contract product development activities to us, to support their development centres in the US and Europe, to shorten their time to market of new products", he said. The products, which will be developed, are not in the public domain and under consideration in line with overall offering to all markets.