Markets for pharmaceutical products—local and overseas--were sluggish during the June and September quarters, said Ramesh Swaminathan, ED and Global CFO of Lupin, in an interview to CNBC-TV18. He, however, was hopeful that the domestic pharma market would start looking up in this quarter and the next.

“Q1 and Q2 the market itself was pretty sluggish. There are individual cases which have done well because of products in their portfolio including products for COVID in some companies and that has caused their India portfolio to do fairly well. Going ahead, we believe India will pick up in Q3 and Q4 and going forward growth will certainly sustain,” Swaminathan said.

He expects margins to improve to 20-21 percent. “EBITDA margins were abysmal at the start of the year, but it has been growing since then. 14.7 percent in Q1, Q2 was about 16.7, and going forward we expect that to stablise and increase. Q4 we expect it to go over 20-21 percent,” he said.

Swaminathan said that the overall growth in India is lackluster and continues to be in the 2-5 percent range.

“Most markets are still to recover in full. If you look at India itself, acute is down, chronic is up, and in case of Lupin, our growth has been little lackluster so far as overall growth in India itself is concerned. Chronic has done fairly well, but overall growth is still in 2-5 percent range,” he said.

For the US business, he said that prescriptions are down in acute as well as chronic. “We are meddling around USD 180 million on a quarterly basis,” he said.

On product launches, he said that Lupin has made some decent launches in the recent past, Albuterol being the most important among them.

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(Edited by : Santosh Nair)