Building Super Brands

Known as the 'Sinarest company', Mumbai-based Centaur Pharma has proved that super brands can be nurtured by mid-sized pharma companies as well. Express Pharma analyses how the company took on more established pharmaceutical companies to create 'Made in India' super brands the hyper competitive anti-cold space. Not just in India, but in some overseas markets as well. But can Centaur Pharma replicate this success?

- Viveka Roychowdhury

How do you value a brand bagging two prescriptions every second? A brand accounting for 60 million prescriptions a year? Probably the only brand to have bagged the Brand of the Year award for five years in succession at the AIOCDAWACS Awards in Marketing Excellence?

This is Sinarest, the flagship brand of Mumbai-based Centaur Pharma, which claims to be India's No.1 anticold brand since 1996. In fact it is the No 1 in Cambodia and Uganda as well.

Established in 1978, the company today is ranked a modest 34th by prescriptions (SMSRC) and ranked 50th by sales as per AWACS. The ranking may be low, but the company has 17 brands ranked No. 1 in their segments. Centaur is India's fourth-largest ophthalmic company by prescriptions with a market share of 24 per cent. Besides the domestic market, the company exports to 110 countries in five continents.

Centaur Pharma is also the country's largest and the world’s third-largest manufacturer of psychotropic active pharmaceuticals ingredients (API) with facilities conforming to global regulators spanning US FDA, EUGMP/ANSM (France), TGA, PMDA (Japan), KFDA (Korea), ANVISA (Brazil), COFEPRIS (Mexico) and WHO-GMP standards. Centaur Pharma’s API formulations plant situated in Ambernath, Maharashtra is also an US FDA approved plant. In addition, Centaur Pharma also has two WHO-GMP approved formulations facilities in Goa. A new fixed dosage formulations facility in Tuem, Goa is to be commissioned by 2021.

Starting small

But the Sinarest saga started in rented facilities in Kalina, then a small suburb of Mumbai. The founder, Shivanand Sawant, Chairman and Man-aging Director, recalls that in around 1972-73, the German principals of his company, Indo Pharma, decided to exit the country. He vowed that he'd rather turn an entrepreneur than search for another job.