Bird flu eats into Hester Pharma net

Hester Pharmaceuticals, a poultry manufacturing vaccines company, witnessed a decline in net profit for the first quarter this year, compared to the previous corresponding period.

The company recorded net profit of Rs 1.21 crore compared to the previous year's Rs 1.26 crore. Hester registered a turnover of Rs 4.98 crore in Q1 this year as compared to Rs 5.06 crore for the previous year.

The recent bird flu outbreak created general fear in public, which made them avoid buying chicken and eggs for a while, the press release stated.

However, this did not affect the company much and it is forecasting that sales will be back on track from August. The company is expanding the capacity at Kadi with investment of about Rs 25 crore. With this, the company's current capacity of 1.2 billion doses will increase fourfold, to 4.8 billion.

"The new facility will be ready by November. It will increase our reach to international markets. Currently, we are falling short of production capacity for identifying and tapping export markets," said Rajiv Gandhi, CEO and MD of Hester Pharmaceuticals.

The company aims to achieve Rs 10-15 crore export turnover in the next year. The doses produced will adhere to the international standards. Hectar has a tie-up with Sinsui, a Japanese company, for tapping the south-east Asian market.

Hester has applied to the Indian government to manufacture bird flu vaccine for chicken. "The application is under consideration and if granted permission, Hectar has the technical ability to fulfill the same. Within two months, we can produce Avian influenza for chicken," said Gandhi.

To fund the company's expansion plans, it has received about Rs 15 crore from Bank of India. The firm's rights issue last month to raise Rs 10 crore received good response from the members, enabling the issue to be fully subscribed.