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How is the scenario in the emerging markets and what is your business strategy for the industry and your company? We are now present in countries across Asia, Russia, CIS, Africa and Latin America. Within this, there are two categories of businesses. One is a traditional business in Russia, CIS, where we are participating across RX (prescription), OTC (over the counter), hospital segments. Then there are entire 45 markets where we are present in the institutional space. This allows Dr Reddy’s to leverage whatever products we are developing for the US and Europe across these 45 emerging markets. Because of this strategy, today Dr Reddy’s is delivering double digit growth in emerging markets and aspires for the same going forward. Most of the emerging markets (EMs) are branded in nature so we continue to focus on building brands. Already, we have been able to hone the capabilities on building brands in the prescription segment, Omez, Nise, many of them are large brands, or OTC products. We not only represent our own products, but also our partners like P&G where we market their brands as well and the institution space. We’ve also started to leverage the licensing of the innovations that we have done for India into EMs because the need there too is the same. How about the domestic market? What is the product line-up? In the domestic market, we have been growing at double digits. We will continue to focus on certain therapeutic areas where we have the endowment, where we want to bring in more and more differentiated or first-time to the market products. We traditionally had products like Omez or Razo and have launched Vonoprazan as well. Recently, Tegoprazan was launched for the first time in India. Both BixiBat and Linaclotide were also first-time launches. We expect a few more launches going forward. The JV with Nestle is going on well. We’re also working to see how we could look at expanding this consumer health into some of our ethical businesses, which are either OTC by definition but being promoted today as a prescription business or has a potential to actually transition into an OTC business. So, India’s story would be one of continued growth — building big brands through branded generics, innovative assets and consumer health. Down the line, how will be business from India and EMs vis-a-vis US and Europe for the company? As Dr Reddy’s had completed the acquisition of Haleon Plc’s global portfolio of consumer healthcare brands in the Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) category outside of the US, Europe has become even more meaningful for us. So is the US. The products we expect to launch including complex generics and biosimilars, both US and Europe are important markets in terms of the size and opportunity to grow. So over the next couple of years, and definitely into the next decade, the US and Europe will continue to remain important growth markets. We will leverage the benefit of having access to these biosimilars in US and Europe into India and EMs. Having said that, in terms of sustainable growing businesses, India and EMs in the overall sense will continue to be even more important going forward and their contributionis expected to grow. How is the potential and opportunity for biosimilars in India and emerging markets? Most of the biosimilars in India and EMs fall into the segment where there are opportunities to brand the product and to promote it. In many of the emerging markets, there’s also a need to localise the product. So we actually locally manufacture the product in a few countries that benefit local manufacturers. This becomes a platform not only for our own biosimilars but also for our partner products. Hence, there is growth coming in from both Dr Reddy’s portfolio as well as the portfolio from the partner products. Apart from the emerging markets of 45 countries where Dr Reddy’s is now present, what are the new geographies/markets being looked into? We already have a presence in the big markets of Russia, Brazil and China. But also in the last couple of years, we’ve also looked into leveraging our institutional portfolio into Central and South America. What kind of investments are being made in India and emerging markets? In India or emerging markets, we have facilities which are catering to our globally production requirements. The capacity expansion would be proportional to the number of products that will be launched globally whether it is in the form of biosimilars or in the form of small molecules.
