 |
| Lupin managing director Nilesh Gupta |
Since Lupin issued disappointing earnings reports to the India stock market the past three quarters, it feels the need to go out and buy the sales it needs to please investors. It plans to do so by acquiring enough other companies to add $1 billion to its sales revenues and make Lupin a $5 billion drugmaker within three years.
At the same time, the company plans to submit new studies for two of its drugs that were rejected earlier by the European Medicines Agency, among 700 generics the agency banned from the EU because of bad clinical-trial data from GVK Bio.
That Lupin can buy those targeted companies is supported by its own revenue growth generated within the company, called "organic growth," which managing director Nilesh Gupta expects to increase by 15% during the second half of the current fiscal year.
CEO Vinita Gupta (the two are siblings of the founder) blamed the slowness of the U.S. FDA for those negative earnings reports. The reports actually were considered negative because they did not meet the bets investors had placed, relying on estimates of what Lupin would report. Lupin wound up in a case of the tail wagging the dog, the failure to meet their expectations causing investors to place less value on its stock.
Nonetheless, the sibling sister CEO said Lupin expects clearances by the U.S. agency in the upcoming quarters, but in the long term she believes it's necessary that the firm increases its capabilities in complex generics such as biosimilars. To her, the worst is over for the company, according to the Business Standard.
One of Lupin's recent problems had to do with that EU ban on those 700 generics, which included trimetazidine and cefpodoxime made by Lupin. That threw the company for a loop until it could conduct and produce new bioequivalence studies for its versions and submit them, which it did recently.
In a regulatory filing, according to NDTV, Lupin added that it also submitted reports on the new studies "to various customers for their external review purpose."
Japan is another story for Lupin. There, the name is part of a popular vintage Japanese anime series featuring a gun-toting thief, now being brought to television.
- here are stories from Business Standard and NDTV