Singapore's Temasek piles into Indian pharma to the tune of $567.7M

Sun Pharmaceutical, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals and Intas Pharmaceuticals, all India-based, are getting a collective investment infusion of $567.7 million--all from Singapore's government.

Temasek Holdings, Singapore's state-owned investment firm, said that for the past 6 months, it or its units had invested that amount in the three drug makers because they have provided the best returns over the past few years.

According to Livemint, Temasek's most recent transaction was purchase of $258.6 million of Daiichi Sankyo's stock in Sun last week. Just days earlier, Temasek units bought $149.1 million worth of Glenmark and last fall $160 million of Intas, a private company.

What Temasek apparently is seeing is what various research companies calculate to be an India drug industry growth rate of at least 14 percent a year, driven in part by a rapid expansion of exports to emerging markets.

India's expansion is expected to continue as India generics makers eye more than a dozen blockbuster drugs losing their patent protection over the next three years. One researcher put the value of those drugs at about $92 billion.

Another research outfit cautioned not to ignore India's domestic market, which it said would continue to register a sustained growth rate of something short of 10 percent, with fast-growing pharmas the target of investors.

On its own, Singapore is building a massive biomedical research and manufacturing complex that has seen a slew of multinationals setup regional hubs and research centers as well as state-of-the-art manufacturing in the past 5 years.

- here's the story from Livemint