Dr Reddy's sees volatile biz in FY22

Dr Reddy's Laboratories expects its business growth to be volatile in the current fiscal as the coronavirus pandemic continues to bring in disruptions and impact the markets across the globe.

The Hyderabad-based drug major, however, noted that despite various challenges in the market, it has enough growth levers to deliver satisfactory performance in terms of business growth this fiscal. "The last few months have seen a second wave of Covid-19 impacting several parts of the world, and the most in India. While vaccinations and several treatment options are now available, rapid spread of the infection has led to further uncertainties in terms of business outlook. Consequently, our overall business growth may remain volatile in FY2022," the drug major said in its annual report for 2020-21.

The company informed its shareholders that despite the challenges in the market it would be able to perform satisfactorily in the ongoing financial year. "We believe that we have enough levers of growth in terms of expanding our market share, new product launches, scale up of several businesses and opportunities arising from Covid-19 products. These should enable us to deliver satisfactory performance in FY2022," the drug maker said.

For the 2020-21 fiscal year, the company posted a consolidated net profit of Rs 1,952 crore as against Rs 2,026 crore in 2019-20. Its net sales increased to Rs 18,420 crore during the last fiscal year as compared with Rs 16,357 crore in 2019-20. The drug maker noted that it remained focused on improving market share position and continued its journey towards creating a leaner business model, leveraging productivity improvement, cost control and increased efficiencies across several functions in FY2021. "Simultaneously, we are committed to investing in business to make it even more competitive and future ready, especially through investments in digitalisation, development of complex products and biosimilars and strengthening of sales and marketing activities in branded markets," it added.

These initiatives will continue in the current fiscal as well, and thus provide necessary impetus to the company's performance in future years, Dr Reddy's stated. "Within manufacturing, we are building Digital Lighthouse plants to increase plant productivity. These initiatives have markedly reduced Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) and per pack costs," it added. Higher productivity is also enabled by scaling up of robotic process automation (RPAs) as well as digitalised processes with automated incident tracking and near zero manual errors, the drug maker said.