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VS Rajan is the founder member and chairman, managing committee of Indian Analytical Instruments Association (IAIA). The 100-member association was formed in 1996, and is the only association in the country representing analytical manufacturers.
IAIA is solely responsible for bringing Analytica Anacon, well-known exhibition-cum seminar on analytical instruments to India.
In an interview to Chronicle Pharmabiz, Rajan spoke on the growth of the analytical instruments market in the country and the issues faced by the AI industry in the country. Excerpts;
What are the current advancement in the field of analytical instruments?
There have been advancement in the areas of speed, technology, and accuracy in today's analytical instruments, compared to what used to be there 10-15 years ago. Today's analytical machines are multi-disciplined i.e. different types of analysis could be don on a single instrument. The current machines have better sensing, computation and data storage abilities. There has been tremendous advancement in HPLC and mass spectrometers used today compared to ones used ten years ago. The impurity estimation is done at a parts per billion (PPB) basis compared to parts per million (PPM) basis earlier.
How GLP-compliant is Indian pharmaceutical industry?
All pharmaceutical companies exporting to regulated markets adopt good GLP in their labs and make use of high quality analytical equipments. Moreover today, cost cutting is synonymous to technology upgradation. In other words, it is cost saving to have a single analytical instrument having the ability to perform multiple analysis, as against doing analysis on different machines. So regardless of their size, Indian companies are going for constant technological upgradation.
Although an investment in latest technology is remunerative in the long run, it takes a chunk of initial investment. So maybe, the small and the medium size companies (with a turnover below Rs. 50 crore), would not be able to afford it. However, as a whole the Indian pharma industry is moving on GLP path.
What is the current size of AI market?
Globally, there are about 1,60,000 analytical instruments, many of which finds simultaneous applications in the areas of petroleum, chemical and pharmaceutical analysis. The global analytical instrument market has grown to the current level of $ 28 billion from $ 4 billion in 1975.
The current Indian AI
market is worth Rs. 1,200 Crore, two-thirds of whose need are met by
instruments imported from Europe and the US. The Indian AI market is
believed to be growing at a healthy rate of 45 per cent annually on
account of the phenomenal growth of domestic pharmaceutical industry.
Sensing the
importance of Indian market, major global names like Agilent
Technologies, Perkin Elmer, Varian, Waters, Thermo Group, Analytik
Jena, Biorad, and others have set up their own offices in the country.
Previously all these players used to market their products through
distributors in the country. Now they do it by themselves, reinforcing
their trust in the growing Indian Market. Thermo
Group of US with a turnover of about $ 3.5 billion and Agilent with a
turnover of $ 2.5 billion would control about 20 per cent of the
global analytical instruments market share. Why
does the Indian industry need to depend mainly abroad for its
instrumentation needs? Even
today, west is the origin of innovation. Although India could boast of
its world-class engineering capabilities, the cultural know how to
invent and develop has not reached the Indian shores as of now. At the
most Indian company is capable of assembling the components imported
from abroad. An
average sized Indian company makes an annual turnover of Rs. 1 crore
compared to $ 150 million of a company in the west. The latter focuses
its business on a global scale and can pump in excessive revenue for
R&D, which is not possible for an Indian company. Today
Indian manufacturers are well capable of making good gas
chromatographers. However, they still have to depend on importers for
spectrophotometers. The quality of PH meters manufactured in the
country is still well accepted although it is technologically not as
advanced as the western meters. May be, a few years down the line the
companies might change their track from assembler to innovator. Continued
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