Sun Pharmaceuticals says it continues to make progress on improvements at the FDA-banned Ranbaxy plants it got in last year’s buyout and is looking for the FDA to reinspect one plant toward the end of this year.
The Indian drugmaker reported its fiscal 2016 earnings on Monday, with net profit for the year ended March 31 up nearly 93% to INR17.1 billion ($255 million), although it fell short of forecasts. In a call with investors, Dilip Shanghvi, Sun founder and managing directorsaid the reinspection of one of the Ranbaxy plants in India is expected by the middle of FY17, LiveMint reported.
“This has been a year of consolidation for us … while we have accrued targeted synergies from the Ranbaxy acquisition, we have also made commensurate investments in building the specialty business in the U.S.," Dilip Shanghvi, managing director, said in a statement.
Last year, Sun completed the $4 billion buyout of long-troubled Ranbaxy Laboratories and set about the task of integrating the two companies and upgrading the four Ranbaxy plants in India that have been banned by the FDA for data integrity and other issues. Shanghvi has said Sun will spend whatever is necessary to get the plants back to FDA expectations.
Those efforts, and a problem at one of Sun’s original plant in Halol that the FDA wanted upgraded have been a drag on the company’s earnings. The drugmaker reported that sales in the U.S. grew 19% to $580 million for Q4, but continued to suffer, off 8% to $2.06 billion for the year.
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