India is the third largest pharma market for Waters, contributing a significant portion of the company’s annual growth. On a recent visit to India, Jeffrey Mazzeo, Vice President, Marketing, Waters Corporation speaks to Viveka Roychowdhury about the new products lined up for 2019 and plans to invest in India
Congratulations on Waters’ completing 60 years globally and 30 years in India. What are the trends for 2019 and what are the solutions that Waters’ will offer to help them cope with these business realities?
We see a couple of trends specifically relevant to India’s pharmaceutical industry, in the areas of complex biosimilar and generic therapeutics. For years, we have experienced a lot of interest in protein based drugs developed by innovator companies. Today, we are seeing the natural evolution of that demand as companies trying to develop biosimilars to those innovator drugs. These molecules are a lot more complex to manufacture and characterise compared to small molecule pharmaceuticals. As such, biopharmaceutical firms are forced to do more testing in more locations throughout the development and manufacturing processes to ensure quality and efficiency of their processes. We believe there is a fundamental need to expand the number of scientists who can perform chromatography and mass spectrometry tests to meet this demand for more testing. Waters is very focused on the biologics area. We see strong demand from the biologics and biosimilars space and we have a lot of new products in the pipeline to excite customers.
In the small molecules arena, we hear a lot about the complexity of generics as well. These complexities can stem from products that contain multiple active pharma ingredients requiring challenging separations of APIs and impurities. Other complexity comes from the many forms a drug is delivered, such as injectables, creams, or ointments. In these cases, sample preparation has become more important. These applications call for advanced technologies with a complete chromatography systems solution as well as with our Empower data systems, the industry standard. A lot of our customers in India are already experienced with Waters separations, detection and software solutions, which is an advantage in addressing evolving complexity of sample analysis.
How important a market is India in Waters global strategy, in terms of market share, revenue contribution to global revenues etc?
For Waters’, over 60 per cent of our global business is pharmaceuticals. That is our number one important market. In India, pharmaceuticals make up more than 80 per cent of our business. So India is a critically important market to Waters. It’s our third largest pharma market across the world, after the US and China. It’s been a high growth area for the company, a significant portion of our annual growth comes from India. We’ve been here direct for more than 30 years. We are going to continue to invest in the India organisation. We expect to continue to grow as India’s pharma industry grows as well.
Can you elaborate on your planned investments in India?
We’re always looking to increase our localised investment in India. As we increase our customer base, we hire more service and sales staff, more application sciences staff. This will certainly continue to be part of our localisation plans moving forward. My key takeaway from this visit is that the Indian pharma industry is very healthy. There are a lot of companies here, that’s for sure, almost all of them are Waters’ customers in some way. I look forward to coming back (to India) multiple times in 2019 to learn from our customers and support new innovations.
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