Our total Capex plan is Rs. 300 - Rs. 350 crore and we are on track to deliver on that across two - three areas, which includes sustainability things, the new multipurpose plant and acquisition of new land, and other Capex, which we talked about in the previous call says Anurag Roy, Chief Executive Officer, Astec LifeSciences Limited while speaking during Q2 FY '23 Earnings Conference Call'.

"Out of this Rs. 225 - Rs. 250 crore is expected to be capitalized in this year and new R&D would be, let's say, around Rs. 110 crore. The new MPP plant would be around Rs. 100 crore," said Madhur Gundecha, Chief Financial Officer, Astec LifeSciences Limited.

"We will have a new R&D center by the end of this year, early January, which will be fully commercialized. It will be a state-of-the-art R&D center where we would be doing a lot of new product generation projects, process optimization, scale-up and product life cycle management work, and we would have the full synthetic labs, the kilo labs, the process safety labs, and the population lab. We are also planning for a biology lab in the subsequent year in the R&D center," said Roy.   

Anurag Roy said, "Our goal, as I mentioned, is at least with the existing R&D centre to commercialize at least two per year. And with the new R&D centre, we really want to take up this number of projects to be commercialized every year. In terms of the pipeline, we do not give firm indication on how many projects are in the pipeline. But all I can say is that with the China Plus strategy and now recently Europe Plus One strategy, we are seeing a good pipeline building up on the CMO side. We are taking systematic steps to work on our technology platform. So currently, we are heavily focusing on triazole chemistry projects, herbicide projects in Phase I and then subsequently, we'll be broadening our CMO pipeline portfolio as we expand into other technology platforms."

"So what we plan to do is we already have good institutional capabilities in terms of the PhDs, some of the scientists, which are currently working with almost 35 - 40 of them with us currently. And at the peak time frame when our R&D facilities will be fully hopefully operational, we are expecting almost 100-plus scientists working out of these facilities," added Roy.