Alembic restarts making Penicillin - G

After a long time, Alembic Ltd once again started the production of Penicillin-G and it is expected to restart Penicillin production which is expected to help the company improve its topline and bottomline.

It has been learnt that the company has restarted production of Penicillin G. Confirming the report, one of the top company official said on condition of anonymity, "The company had restarted production of Penicillin from this quarter (second quarter)."

According to him, approximately for last two years the company had abandon the production of Pen-G production due to the stiff fall in the price of Pen-G in the international market.

But recently as the international price of Pen-G started looking upward, the company had decided to restart the production of Pen-G.

In the '60's, the Alembic entered Pen-G production. Then it had an capacity of 2,000 million mega units (mmu) per months at its integrated Vadodara facility. However, the source was not able to say on the current production capacity of Pen-G.

During 2004, the Pen-G production was affected in India, after the Chinese company started mass production of Pen-G. Though Pen-G was in demand, the glut in the domestic and international markets was making prices unviable. As per the experts, the prices fell from $10 per billion units (bu) in 2003 to $5.8 per bu in 2004.

Presently, the international price of Pen-G is at $18-19 per bu. According to the top company official, the rise of the international price of Pen-G will certainly improve the topline and bottomline of the company a lot.

However, he did not forecast the percentage rise in topline and bottomline of the company with the restart of Pen-G. He further said the production of the Pen-G undertaken by the company is meant for domestic as well as the export.

Pen-G is the building block for key antibiotics such as ampicillin.

In the mid-1990s, Indian industry invested about Rs 750 crore in manufacturing capacity for Pen-G.