India's Shasun sets up first US site
is planning to plant its roots in the US to try and drum up more
business in this lucrative market.
Shasun Chemicals & Drugs, which conducts manufacturing of finished dosage forms, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and intermediates for the global market, has decided to set up a process development facility in Piscataway, New Jersey. The firm said the site will provide API development services in the preclinical and clinical trial stages to customers in North America and also extend backend support to the CRAMS partners in the same geography. The first phase of this new plant will be operational from April 2008 and it is expected to reach full capacity as of October 2009, after which point the company has plans for subsequent growth and investments in the facility. 50 new jobs will be created as a result. "The investments in this project are significant and represent the management's long-term financial commitment," the company said. Shasun, which is based in Chennai, Tamilnadu, has long had its sights set on attracting customers from the west. In July last year the firm gained US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of a new formulation facility in Puducherry, and had already received approval from the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) the previous October. Speaking to in-PharmaTechnologist.com at the time, Shasun's whole time director Vimal Kumar said he viewed the approval of the plant, which handles oral solid dosages, as paving the way for a new business venture. "The US market is very important. We believe we could get better value and better margins", he said. At the same time, the company has also been busy "rapidly increasing its global presence". As part of this, Shasun recently made its first acquisition, buying up UK-based Rhodia Pharma, which is now part of a subsidiary called Shasun Pharma Solutions. With this purchase, Shasun gained two UK manufacturing plants, in Dudley and Annan, and became a multinational company. The addition of the new US site builds upon this global reach. Kevin Cook, director of operations at Shasun Pharma Solutions said: "The US facility will allow us to provide North American customers with a local service offering to compliment our existing sites in Europe and India". According to Kumar, the new Piscataway site will also help "generate new opportunities for us to serve the rapidly expanding North American market." However, Shasun's strategy of establishing new sites in western locations is an interesting one, as it comes at a time when the increasing trend across the pharma industry is to move this kind of work away from the US to lower cost emerging market destinations such as India. Still, it is something that firms such as Shasun, that have traditionally only operated in these offshore locations, are starting to embark on, in a bid to move on from simply being a service provider and evolve into a company that is capable of taking a place on the global stage - something that requires having both eastern and western facilities.
