Zydus Healthcare moves India marketing operations to Mumbai

Zydus Healthcare is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cadila Healthcare

In a major move, Ahmedabad-headquartered drug major Cadila Healthcare is in the process to shift its India marketing operations entirely to Mumbai in a newly acquired property in Goregaon East. The company is also shifting to a new corporate office in its hometown.

Familiar sources said that the marketing function was split into two places - Ahmedabad and Mumbai. As a part of some internal restructuring, it was decided to consolidate the entire operations in Mumbai. Earlier this year, the company had bought around 80,000 square feet space at a business park on the Western Express Highway in Goregaon East.

"The India formulations business, apart from the biologics business, has been spun off to a separate subsidiary - Zydus Healthcare Ltd, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Cadila Healthcare. This is part of internal restructuring done for administrative purposes. The India marketing function comes under Zydus Healthcare which has bought the office space in Mumbai," said the source.

Around 300 people are expected to operate from the Goregaon office now and the process of employee transfers have begun. There would be around 30 sub-segments within the marketing function.

Cadila Healthcare had a Mumbai sales and marketing office earlier.

Meanwhile, Cadila Healthcare, which operates out of Zydus Towers in the Satellite neighbourhood of Ahmedabad, is also moving its corporate office to a now under construction building on the fringe of Ahmedabad on Sarkhej-Gandhinagar highway closer to the state capital of Gandhinagar.

The corporate office, research and development departments, human resources, sales and finance functions would continue to operate out of Ahmedabad. The senior management would continue to operate from the corporate office.

Earlier this year, Cadila Healthcare had edged past its peers to become the second most valuable pharmaceutical company in India. In a stock rally in June that was triggered by the approval for the generic version of Lialda, a drug used for treating ulcerative colitis with sales of $1.14 billion, Cadila Healthcare had inched next to Sun Pharma in terms of market capitalisation on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in the first week of June.

The stock has seen some erosion since, and it now ranks fourth among top pharma firms in the country in terms of m-cap after Sun Pharma, Piramal and Cipla.