Laurus Labs Limited is planning a Capex guidance of Rs. 2,000 crore across all the subsidiaries and divisions, says Dr. Satyanarayana Chava, Founder & CEO, Laurus Labs Q2 FY '23 Earnings Conference Call.  

V. V. Ravi Kumar, Executive Director & CFO, Laurus Labs Limited said, "On the Capex front, we have invested Rs. 416 crore in the first half and we are broadly in line with our guidance for the two years around Rs. 2,000 crore across all the subsidiaries and divisions. And we remain on course to strengthen our position as a cost effective integrated pharma player."

"We are investing in the backward integration program and creating more capacity. The additional investments in the capacities we are expecting will be in the non-ARV sites. On the quality side, we are still bullish on the overall business of the company. The FDF ARVs are only a one-off kind of a thing in the second quarter and we expect it to restore from the quarter three onwards," added Kumar.

Dr. Satyanarayana Chava, Founder & CEO, Laurus Labs Limited, "We have over 50 active projects at different stages and ongoing commercial supplies of 4 APIs and several intermediates. Our greenfield investment to set up a dedicated R&D center for the Synthesis division at Genome Valley, Hyderabad and three manufacturing units in Vizag under Laurus Synthesis Private Limited is progressing as per our previous timelines. New sites for this division will have the capabilities to handle steroids, hormones and high potent molecules apart from medium and large volume products."

Our Laurus Bio revenues were largely stable at Rs. 27 crore versus Rs. 26 crore quarter-on- quarter. But we do anticipate pick-up of new capacities with our large scale CDMO partners in the second half of this financial year. However, for H1, the sales grew 41% year-on-year. We believe the alternate food industry is likely to grow meaningfully over the coming years. Scale, cost and functionality will remain core drivers for differentiation for the players. We want to capture this opportunity and would like to expand our capacity, both at R1 to have more R&D projects and also complete the investment in balancing equipment at R2 to scale up these projects from R1. We are also in the final planning stage to further expand our manufacturing capacity on a greenfield site in Karnataka itself."