The buyout - Jubilant's fifth acquisition outside India and the third in the US - will reinforce the company's leading CRAMS business and could now propel Jubilant into a top position in the injectables contract manufacturing field.

The Indian CRAMS market is a buoyant one estimated to have generated $895m last year, and expected to reach $6.6bn by 2013, according to new data released this week by Frost & Sullivan.

Jubilant has been capitalising on the outsourcing opportunities in this market and now plans to conquer further the US arena.

"[This acquisition] gives us a ready entry into contract manufacturing of injectables and presents a compelling business opportunity, especially in the US market," said Shyam Bhartia and Hari Bhartia, co-managing directors of Jubilant, in a joint statement.

"Added to that, it also brings with it, a high quality, steady cash flow allergy extracts and products business."

Hollister-Stier, based in Washington state, specialises in the manufacturing of sterile injectable vials and lyophilisation products, and is also one of the world's top manufacturers of allergenic extracts. The firm generated $55m in revenues with an EBITDA of $10.9m last year.

Jubilant is getting a foot into a budding market as Hollister's largest segment within its injectables business is small-volume parenterals, an area that represents two-thirds of the entire sterile formulations market.

Injectables have been the fastest growing contract manufacturing segment, despite the fact that making them involves complex manufacturing processes, rigorous FDA compliance requirements and high capital investment, all of which have held back the availability of manufacturing capacitiy, said Jubilant.

Over the last few years, contract manufacturing has grown and drug companies are now much more open to outsourcing injectables.

The advantage for services providers like Jubilant is that compared to solid dose contract manufacturing, the injectables market is a lot less competitive because there are only a few reliable players with injectables capabilities and expertise required to serve big pharma and biotech clients, the company said.

Lyophilisation is also a growing product segment within injectables manufacturing, and increasingly more injectable products will be lyophilised to increase shelf life.

The acquisition is expected to be completed by June.

This move comes as no surprise as Jubilant has seen an increase in new business this year. The firm recently announced it has bagged $60m worth of contracts with pharma companies for the calendar year 2007 and the vast majority of these deals have come from Europe and the US.

These new annual contracts represent a 50 per cent increase over the $40m-worth of deals that the firm signed last year, a company spokesperson told Outsourcing-Pharma.com last month.