‘’Pharma companies and equipment vendors should share a symbiotic relationship’’

What is the business outlook of the pharmaceutical sector, your key customer-vertical?

Manoj Chaudhari

The Indian pharma sector is expected to witness a stiff competition in the coming years with many MNCs entering the market directly. This is good news for patients as they will get access to the best medicines at the cheapest possible prices. However, for the pharma players, that will lead to a few difficulties. Retaining the current high pace of growth, staying competitive through innovation, regular introduction of new drugs, and talent retention will be some of the challenges they will face in the near future.

What role does modern technology equipment play in keeping the pharma companies competitive?

Most large pharma companies in India cater to the US and the European markets. To stay competitive in those markets, they need to have high-precision equipment that eliminate the room for human error. High competition in the sector also made these companies conscious about their process and quality standards. As a result, they are looking to invest in the latest technology equipment that assures high quality output.

Modern technology equipment helps the pharma companies to improve their process efficiency. Technology has eliminated the need to physically visit a unit to start or stop a process as these tasks can be accomplished remotely. Technology also helps pharma companies to monitor and analyse the relevant production data such as total product-rejections, error-history, process flow, and packaging. With technology tools, it has also become easier today to generate, store, analyse, and safeguard business critical information, thus mitigating risks associated with data loss.

Which flagship products are targeted for pharma companies?

W300 series Pharmaceutical Grade Washers, MSC High Pressure Washer, Deep Freezer (with temperatures down to -86°C) are some of the leading products from Mack Universal targeted at the pharma industry.

These products have been designed keeping in mind aspects such as safety, process integrity, flexibility, precision, quality, and compliance standards, in addition to the function-specific requirements.

Today, no pharma player can afford to have a drop in quality. If you do not maintain the quality of your products, you will be out of race, and sooner or later, out of business.

Mack Universal offers maintenance and support services to help our pharma clients sustain their high-quality standards across production processes and business functions.

What was the estimated turnover of Mack Universal for the financial year 2012-13?

Our overall group turnover was about Rs 100 million, with 20 per cent being the contribution of Mack Universal. For 2013-14, our target is to grow the sales by 30 per cent.

What are the latest technologies in the pharma equipment business that you plan to introduce?

Till the last financial year, we were only into small Quality Control and Lab Equipment. But this year, we will venture into the production-class machinery. Pharma companies are looking for some upgradation in Process Technology, Inspection, and Packaging Technology. These three, Process, Packaging, and Inspection, will be the areas we will focus on. For instance, we will introduce high-end models in process and inspection technology this year. We will introduce only such equipment that will help our pharma customers to improve their production processes and aid in quality assurance (QA).

What do you perceive as key challenges of the equipment makers and vendors in India?

The small scale units have several challenges to deal with today. The global equipment manufacturers like Bosch and Fette have set up their manufacturing plants in India. While that has opened up avenues in terms of availability of knowledge of new technology in the Indian market, it has also placed tremendous pressure on the local companies.

Moreover, while high competition and long sales cycles continue to bother us, an absence of support from the government adds to our challenges. Due to its fragmented nature, the community of domestic equipment manufacturers also finds it difficult to influence the Government’s policy making. We need the Government to come up with policies to specifically support the small scale pharma equipment manufacturers so as to help them sustain and scale up.

Delayed payments and high service demand expectations are the other challenges. We optimise our operations to stay afloat despite constantly diminishing margins due to competition.

What efforts should be taken at the industry level involving the pharma customers?

A collaboration between pharma clients and equipment manufacturers will prove useful for both the parties. It will help us, the equipment makers, to understand the clients’ requirements better. The specific inputs and suggestions from pharma customers will enable us to design products and solutions that aptly address the customer-requirements. With such symbiotic relationship in place, the manufacturers like us can invest in technology without worrying about its sale. We are taking active efforts to make such collaboration happen by initiating a dialogue with some of our pharmaceutical clients.