Colorcon builds coating biz with Indian buy
The acquisition, which is expected to complete on August 1, includes the Navi Mumbai-headquartered firm’s portfolio of coatings and excipients as well as its in-construction manufacturing facility in Goa.
Colorcon’s general manager of film coatings, Kamlesh Oza, told in-pharmatechnologist that: “Asia Pacific is a rapidly growing pharmaceutical market,” adding that “[Pharmaceutical Coatings’] customer base in India was somewhat important to the decision.
“However,” he continued: “Colorcon currently has a strong customer base in the region along with a high quality manufacturing site, technical service laboratory and regional technical and customer support.”
Oza explained that Pharmaceutical Coatings’ broad product portfolio, particularly its range of tablet film coating technologies, was a key driver for the acquisition.
He predicted that these new technologies and platforms will augment Colorcon’s formulation offering across its pharmaceutical, vitamin, herbal and nutraceutical industry businesses.
The deal, financial terms of which were not disclosed, marks the latest stage of a busy programme of business expansion and development Colorcon has undertaken over the last few months.
The process began in April when the US firm bought NP Pharma to expand its tablet and capsule formulation business with new manufacturing capacity in Bazainville, France.
A few months later, in June, the firm’s focus switched to South America with the opening of additional laboratory and formulation development capacity at its unit in the Brazilian capital Sao Paulo.
More recently Colorcon, in partnership with Dow Wolf Cellulosics, added to its pharmaceutical excipient offering with a new product specifically designed to direct compression tablet production.
Whether Colorcon will maintain this level of geographical and business expansion activity this summer remains to be seen, but clearly the firm wants to increase activity in emerging markets and bolster its technology offering.
