The Bangalore-based Biocon India has appointed DSP Merrill Lynch and Kotak Mahindra as financial advisors for its initial public offering (IPO).
A company official said, "We have appointed DSP and Kotak as financial advisors but are yet to decide on the timing of the IPO."
This listing is aimed at funding the company's expansion, including research and development and facility upgradation.
The biotech firm is keen to tap the US and European markets and would be setting up a subsidiary in the US this fiscal year.
"The targets markets besides India include US, Canada, South America, Middle East, Europe & South Asia," said the official.
Biocon, which clocked sales of Rs 150 crore last year and a profit of Rs 22-25 crore, hopes to maintain a profit growth of 30 per cent.
It has an US FDA approval for manufacturing lovastatin, statins are a group of cholesterol-lowering drugs, which has gone off patent in December 2001.
In addition, the company is foraying into immuno-suppresants, anti-diabetics and recombinant DNA products. Statins is expected to push the current year's earnings lower due to a price decline.
Among the launches expected this year are a series of anti-diabetes products such as roziglitazone followed by two other anti-diabetics repaglinide and netaglinide. Biocon already manufacturers and exports pioglitazone, a drug for type-II diabetes.
The biotech company, which initially started manufacturing enzymes for packaged fruit juices, has also come up with a hybrid reactor, which combines the low cost of solid-state fermentation with the virtues of the submerged process, such as better-controlled feeding of organisms.
The contraption, which makes it easier to contain organisms and to extract what they produce, will help Biocon to graduate from novel processes to new drug products, such as genetically engineered anti-infectives.
