Charting ambitious growth plans

Sartorius Stedim has invested about Rs 28.52 crore in India for expanding its competencies and capabilities

The Sartorius Group is an internationally-leading laboratory and process technology provider covering biotechnology and mechatronics segments.

The company reported sales of Rs 95 crore from its life sciences business in FY09 as against Rs 90 crore in FY08.

Though the downturn affected Sartorius, the company still went ahead with its ambitious growth plans and investments in making India the center of excellence for its Asian market requirements.

About Rs 28.52 crore (€5 mn) has been invested in India for expanding the competencies, capability and capacity to serve the group and Asian market requirements. Since the beginning of this year, the company has seen large orders for core equipments for large biopharmaceutical plants.

In production technology, the biopharmaceutical industry is currently witnessing a complete paradigm shift. The industry is increasingly switching from stainless steel equipment to single-use products. As a market-focused organization, Sartorius has been strategically heading and propelling developments to create a portfolio of products and services to serve its customers with a total solutions approach.

While the equipment business slowed down in line with the economic sentiments, the consumable and single-use devices saw a significant growth. The industry really promoted the membrane-based chromatography devices which saw it move from R&D through process development into commercial production in several customers in vaccine industry. The trend towards single-use fluid handling bags, connectors and more critically, the bioreactors, was quite evident as the industry looked to reduce its capital costs and speed up its expansion and development time.

With the best-in-class design, engineering, manufacturing, process control and application support competencies in India, the company offers the widest and best integrated portfolio in the industry for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals using single-use and hybrid systems. The company is optimistic that it would be launching highly attractive new products for the biopharmaceutical industry and R&D in 2010 as well.