Hikal Survives and Thrives by Managing Supply Chain Challenges and Delivering Innovative Solutions
27 July 2022 Hikal offers solutions across the life sciences value chain. The company, founded in 1988, looks to build lasting relationships with its customers by providing world-class active ingredients, intermediates and R&D services to a variety of industries including crop protection. AgriBusiness Global reached out to team members at Hikal to learn how they’ve dealt with supply chain disruptions during the past two years and the challenges looking ahead.
ABG: Can you tell me about your company?
Hikal: Hikal is a reliable partner to companies in the crop protection, biocide, pharmaceutical, animal health, biotech, and specialty chemical industries. We manufacture and supply quality active ingredients (AIs), intermediates, biocides to the global life sciences industry. Hikal has five manufacturing facilities in India at Maharashtra (Taloja and Mahad), Gujarat (Panoli), and Bengaluru (Jigani) and a world-class research and technology center at Pune. Our facilities have been inspected and certified by global regulatory authorities. We create and deliver sustainable solutions for our partners and customers across the life-sciences value chain.
At Hikal, we combine research and technology, manufacturing capabilities, and intellectual capital to deliver world-class offerings to global innovator companies. With a rich experience in synthesizing diverse classes of molecules in a cost- effective manner, we partner with companies for custom synthesis and custom manufacturing of key intermediates and active ingredients. Our domain expertise, coupled with our advanced manufacturing plants, has enabled us to develop our own globally marketed products as well.
ABG: How has your company dealt with the evolving supply chain restraints?
Hikal: We have been quite successful in mitigating the risks due to unpredictable supply chain scenario over the past few years. The key area we focused upon was reducing the dependency on a single country or source by developing alternate suppliers not only within India but other geographies as well. We also gave more emphasis to supply assurance rather than cost. We have already reduced our dependency on China for raw materials from 39% to 24% and our target is to reduce it further to between 15% and 20%.
ABG: With different regions around the world increasing regulatory restrictions on ag chem, how has your company responded?
Hikal: Regulatory restrictions have indeed increased in the past few years; however, we are of an opinion that a comprehensive set of studies should be conducted and adequate consultations with stakeholders of the agchem industry should be done before making the decisions to restrict or ban any product. As a responsible care company, we are fully committed to the environment and welfare of our farmers hence our focus is on developing newer molecules, which have a lower risk profile and are used in lower dosages compared to old generic products.
ABG: What are two challenges you see affecting the agchem industry in the next year?
Hikal: The agchem industry will have to be more agile than ever and design strategies from a long-term perspective. The two biggest challenges we foresee are supply security and sustainability.
ABG: How is your company helping with those issues?
Hikal: To ensure seamless supply of our products to our customer we have been building real-time network visibility, maintaining safety stocks, and using analytics to identify weak links in the supply chain. Secondly, we focus on backward integration, as much as possible, to reduce our dependency on imported intermediates and key raw materials.
Our ESG philosophy (environmental, social, governance) complements our long-term sustainability goals, which is the need of the hour in the agchem industry.
ABG: What new products do you have coming out?
Hikal: We have recently introduced two new fungicides ― prothioconazole and trifloxystrobin. We are fully backward integrated in these two products and have no dependency on China. Going forward, we have few more exciting products in the pipeline. Our core strength includes maintaining our backward integration and handling multi-step synthesis.
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