Steriscience, page-145

Strides has announced a significant change in its plans.

In September 2019, Strides took a controlling 54% stake in Indian-headquartered Stelis Biopharma. The stated purpose of this investment was to not only enable Stelis Biopharma to become a global player in the biopharmaceutical space but also to accelerate Strides’ re-entry into sterile injectables.

Stelis had a new 200,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility designed to meet global cGMP standards which was suitable for both biologic APIs (Stelis) and injectables (Steriscience).

Strides planned to develop a phased portfolio for the injectables business. The base of the injectables portfolio was to be 30-40 generic products which Strides could develop by itself using its current know-how. The next stage of the portfolio was to be 10-15 specialised injectables, products which were difficult to manufacture and therefore had limited competition. These niche injectables were to be either developed in-house or in-licensed. Finally, Strides planned to develop 5-10 differentiated products with significant market opportunity. The intention was to partner with an R &D company to utilize its proprietary platform technology to develop differentiated products to solve for clinical, R&D, manufacturing and supply chain challenges.

That plan has now changed.

Last week, Strides announced that it would demerge the Stelis business and list it separately, saying that it believed that the delisting would add significant value in the near term to Strides' shareholders. After strategic review it was decided that Strides will continue to develop the injectables business on its own “keeping all the economics, but will not play a domain game as we had in our previous quarter as in Agila, where we had multiple facilities, 200 ANDAs. And instead pick and choose portfolio of products, which are complementary to our strategy of finding niche and complex products...”

With its focus remaining on key regulated markets, Strides also announced a strengthening of its global executive team.

Terry Coughlin was announced as CEO of Strides’ US business. Coughlin, who will be based in the US, comes from Endo Pharmaceuticals, where he was the Executive VP and Chief Operating Officer. Also from Endo, where he was Executive VP for International Business, is Rahul Garella, the new Chief Commercial Officer for International Markets. Garella will be based in London. Strides' new Chief Operations Officer, based in Bangalore, is Christoph Funke. He will oversee global manufacturing, supply chain and quality operations, along with operations excellence. Funke comes from leading global injectables player, Fresnius Kabi, where he was the Executive Vice President of Global Manufacturing.

In response to an analyst’s question regarding Strides’ decision to invest in selective injectables on its own, the Chairman of Strides, Arun Kumar, commented

What Strides is doing is more selectively picking up products that they can add value to the portfolio with this complex niche… Terry, who was the CEO and the Head of Sales -- Head of Business in Endo, ran a very successful injectable business of revenues with over $1 billion in less than 10 years. I think we lean on people like him to collaborate in license, work on more complex products as we have completed our program of generic development…. So I think it will be wise for us to wait for a couple of quarters to see what portfolio has been selected.

https://www.strides.com/media-pressrelease.html

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/edited-transcript-srid-ns-earnings-100000396.html