Ranbaxy promoters bring group firms on Religare platform

Even as pharmaceutical major Ranbaxy’s US woes continue unabated, the Singh family, who sold their entire stake in Ranbaxy to Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo, is going ahead with a major re-branding exercise that will see Religare as their flagship brand in place of Ranbaxy in the other companies where they have significant stake.

The group’s testing lab chain SRL Ranbaxy has been renamed as Religare Super Laboratories. RanAir, its charter aviation company will be known as Religare Voyages. About 15 group companies, including joint ventures like Religare Macquarie Private Wealth, Religare Aegon and Vistaar Religare have come under the umbrella brand Religare.

The Religare management, however, said that the re-branding is purely a commercial exercise. “SRL Ranbaxy has always been part of our group. The logic behind this brand change (into Religare Super Labs) is simply realistic. Religare (financial services) is a huge brand with 1,400 offices in 500 cities and a huge retail following. We could leverage that for the diagnostics business,” Sunil Godhwani, CEO and managing director, Religare Enterprises Ltd, said.

Godhwani said that Religare will grow from a financial services brand to a broad service-oriented brand. “We have decided to bring all businesses in the services domain under the common brand. Religare is today not only in financial services. It is in wellness, healthcare, aviation, technology, etc. We are basically in the services segment and Religare is a service-oriented brand,” Godhwani explained.

“We are not judging brands. We are only doing it from a commercial perspective where we can leverage the business and take it to the next level. We feel that we could leverage the business of SRL in a better manner for its next phase of growth if it is rebranded as Religare. At no point it was felt that the earlier name was bad or there was anything wrong with it. Now, there is certain credibility that come with the Religare brand because of the IPO and the huge penetration we have in the country. We have a huge private client base on the wealth management side. With the institutions, through Religare Capital Markets Ltd, we are servicing close to 60 corporates,” he said.

Malvinder Singh, who leads the promoter group, had recently told Business Standard that post Ranbaxy-deal, which could see the group getting about Rs 10,000 crore, the promoters will invest heavily in Religare firms.