Inventys Research Company Pvt Ltd
Unlocking avenues as a new age chemical industry leader
Entrepreneurship has swept the whole world; transforming almost every corner of the business world. The inventive minds of the landscape have been leveraging the best of the advancements at full tilt to infuse new edge across the existing scenario in every industry.
The foundation of these successful businesses is laid down with the desire to build something distinctive-to infuse an idea, solution or a product that has not been presented before.
The torchbearers behind these solitary businesses are the real game changers who put their efforts, sweat and hard work to create an indigenous business unit.
Dr. Deepak B Birewar is one such veteran who has created a mark in the chemical manufacturing sphere with his venture Inventys Research. A catalytic agent of change, Dr. Birewar has always approached change with open arms.
"In fact, I would like to change before the change hits you. Rather than waiting for the change to happen, we like to innovate, improve, and change for better – through our initiative.", he asserts during a candid chat with The CEO Magazine.
In the present scenario, the world is on track to shift the global Chemical Products dependencies away from China.
In this vocation, the absence of sound Chemical Manufacturing companies to deliver world-class business processes, technical capabilities, and the ability to build dependable supply chains for these global customers drives up the wall.
Fortunately, India is anchoring its position to capitalize on this wave by developing a fair competency in developing the chemical manufacturing technologies and organizations like Inventys are able to complement this ecosystem – in order to exploit the global wave of moving chemical manufacturing away from China to India.
Incorporated in 2005, Inventys hails as a research-based company with more than four decades of the heritage of demonstrated excellence in process development, scale-up and manufacturing.
An ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001 certified chemical leader, Inventys has embarked on a journey that has already initiated progressive and radical change in the industry with manufacturing of Specialty Chemicals, Advanced Intermediates, AIs and APIs in the space of both Contract Manufacturing and Custom Synthesis Manufacturing.
Spearheading the company's rapid growth with extensive experience across domains, industries and markets, Dr. Birewar stands as a proud leader of this leading chemical player. In a chat with The CEO Magazine, he shares his vision of creating a transformation in the world of chemical manufacturing.
Inventys delivers customized manufacturing services as sustainable value adding solutions for innovative, established, and emerging life science companies. Considering our size, what sets us apart is our drive for innovation.
For some of the intermediates, Inventys' extremely strong engineering – one of the best in the world in fact – has been an important factor. For many of the advanced intermediates, our success has relied on our absolutely cutting-edge technology, often offering unrivalled and unique chemistry.
We believe that without innovation, you are not even a contender – in today's fast-changing world of global competition. Research is a cornerstone of our growth strategy.
We heavily invest in technology and science. In 2017, we invested more than seven percent of our revenues in our R&D, which represents a remarkable commitment for a company of our size and sets us on top of the list of our competitors.
If we actually consider the resources channeled to Inventys' new R&D and Pilot plant facilities over the past three years, those investments equal to our one year's revenue! As a matter of fact, almost all our profits (and some more) of the last ten years have been invested in R&D and related facilities.
We welcome challenges as opportunities, we have embarked on an ambitious strategy of launching more 15 new products in the next 18 months. We have developed technologies for manufacturing these products.
Our new plants are getting ready during Q4 2018. Our key challenge in the coming months would be to effectively execute and capture adequate market segments for these new products.
Our client base includes some of the global innovator companies in Agrochemical, Pharmaceutical and Specialty Chemical space. We have been working with the world's leading innovators for over a decade, although currently most of our CDMO efforts are centered on innovators' mature products.
With such a fast-growing team, how do you make sure everybody stays motivated and how do you support the corporate culture?
Motivation comes from enjoying your work, to become the best you can be, in a fair and ethical environment. We strive to provide ever increasing opportunities to our team – in such an environment.
Inventys has embarked on a journey to deliver customized manufacturing services as sustainable value adding solutions for innovative, established and emerging life science companies.
With research and development as cornerstones, we envision firmly establishing ourselves as a partner of choice for our customers in both overseas and Indian markets.
This is supported by our backward integration, state-of-the-art automated plants, sustainable ethical business practices and high competence in process engineering and in-house research.
Over the next two years we have set ourselves ambitious targets to complete the following key tasks and to achieve the milestones as summarized below:
· Grow our product offering from a set of 2-3 products to more than 15 products in a short span of 2 years. These products will serve Agrochemical, Pharmaceutical and Specialty Chemicals segments.
· Start manufacturing APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients) and AIs (Active Ingredients for Agrochemical uses). This will enable Inventys to move up the value chain from the current focus on advanced intermediate.
At the same time, we will also add some mid-value intermediates to expand the customer base substantially and to achieve a healthy growth in the top line.
· We further aim to receive at least two DMFs and one CoS from the US FDA and from European Medicines Agency respectively.
· We are also planing to expand our customer base to cover new geographies like Japan and USA. Our entire customer base currently resides in Western Europe.
· We also intend to start supplying to the Indian market. So far Inventys has been exclusively an exporter with no sales within India. We now intend to supply certain high-value advanced intermediates, APIs as well as mid-value intermediates to support Indian Agro and Pharma sector.
The focus here would be to establish a dependable supply base for sustainable manufacturing as an alternative to Chinese and European suppliers.
· For achieving these objectives Inventys will need to implement several new chemistries as well as challenging unit operations. We also intend to start construction on a new 17-acre site to complement our current 7-acre site. This site is expected to support future growth post-2021.
The most difficult lesson I would say was learnt when I shut down my previous software business (2001-2002) in the USA. Shutting down the business you have started is not very different from losing your loved one.
The most important lesson I have learnt from this episode is to build safety reserve and not to overleverage. Because global markets can change in a blink and all your plans can fly away, as it happened in America in the software domain in the 2000-2002 period.
The journey has been fulfilling, to say the least. There have been ups and downs, challenges, successes and of course failures. I am grateful that I was able to survive and keep standing!
Chairman and Managing Director
Qualification: B Tech (IIT Bombay); PhD (Carnegie Mellon)
Expertise: 29 years of diverse global business experience. Primarily in USA & in India.
Dr. Johannes Lubosch
Executive Vice President Strategy, Portfolio, Sustainability
Qualification: PhD Organic Chemistry (University Heidelberg)
Expertise: 37 years Global Business experience
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