Almelo, a leader in the manufacture of pharmaceutical ingredients, intermediaries and KSM was started back in 1979 by Mr. T S Prasad. Mr. Prasad completed his bachelor degree in commerce from the Indian Institute of Management and Commerce in 1980 and has been leading Almelo ever since. His entrepreneurship has led Almelo grow from a small-scale dye manufacturing company to an advanced pharmaceutical ingredients manufacturing group of companies. To begin with, Almelo was solely dedicated to the textile industry for the first 20 years and eventually moved to the pharma industry to leverage their manufacturing capabilities. The team believed that shifting to pharma would allow them the opportunity to capitalize their extensive knowledge combined with the resources and infrastructure they had to contribute to a better cause. The MD, Mr Prasad has also won lifetime achievement award for outstanding contribution in promoting chemical industry.
Almelo is one of the very few drug manufacturing companies that has complete backward integrability. The team believes that a strong supply chain is the most integral part in any manufacturing process and therefore, they decided to take complete control of this to ensure cost-effectiveness. It consists of a fully equipped research facility built to support its internal supply chain and to offer custom Research and Development Services.
This pharmaceutical manufacturing company offers a variety of products such as Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API), specialty chemicals that are used in new drug development. Alongside these, it also propels Intermediates and KSMs to support their client requirements and their own supply chain. Almelo has received an array of accreditations, namely, WHO GMP Certified, ISO 9001:2015 Certified, Japan PMDA – AFM Certified and many more.
While most Indian pharma companies are moving towards the specialty sector, where the products are typically defined on high value and low volume, Almelo works in the limited sectors where the chances of sustainability are high. The core value of this organization is the quality of products they offer. In this regard, they take care of the supply chain themselves and conduct routine quality checks. With an automated manufacturing process for API, this company is scaling into producing larger volumes very rapidly.
Almelo intends to bridge a monumental gap in the pharma industry. It aims at cost leadership and excellence by making products better, cheaper and faster by adopting a large-scale production. Almelo offers its products at prices that are lower than the general market price. When it comes to innovation, Almelo is undertaking chemistries that Indian companies have not heard of as yet. While the journey has been successful, they had to face multiple challenges in terms of employing people with the correct skill set coupled with the basic foundational knowledge. Another challenge was the perception people built around the products. API Buyers these days resort to being overly price sensitive despite having sustainable formulation cost structures and this poses an issue for a team that believes in delivering quality products.
Almelo has promising plans for the future. It intends to resort to forward integration by focusing on different products like narcotics and drugs. The team is already innovating in terms of producing unique products and also working on manufacturing an anti-COVID19 drug.
“It has always been a very core sector. It withstood all types of geopolitical events and pandemics. In terms of the future, there is going to be more emphasis over quality and specialized therapies and all these are going to be the barrier of entries for a new company to come in. I believe the industry is going to get closer and closer as opposed to getting opened and fragmented. It is going to get more consolidated from many angles”, concludes T.S. Prasad, the Founder and Managing Director of Almelo.
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