Roquette has announced the completion of the acquisition of a majority stake in Crest Cellulose from Pravesha Industries, a pharma packaging company in India.

The creation of this joint-venture will, Roquette says, reinforce its position as a major supplier to the pharmaceutical industry and a global leader in superior natural-based pharmaceutical excipients. The company goes on to say that the addition of Crest Cellulose’s know-how and production capabilities to Roquette’s strong expertise and track-record in the pharmaceutical excipients market will create new opportunities for both Roquette’s and Crest Cellulose’s customers and employees as the companies both share a commitment towards innovation, quality and excellence.

Crest Cellulose manufactures a wide range of excipients.

This strategic investment allows Roquette to expand its offering of pharmaceutical excipients and nutraceuticals, following the acquisition of Blanver Pharmaceutical’s excipients division in 2017. It is also said to underpin Roquette’s commitment to increasing its footprint and proximity to customers in India to serve the large and fast-growing pharmaceutical sector. The size of this market was estimated at $33 billion in 2017 and was growing at over 10% per year at the beginning of 2018. India supplies over half of the global demand for various vaccines, and 25% of all medicines in the world.

Jean-Marc Gilson, CEO of Roquette, said: “The creation of this joint-venture with Pravesha Industries is key in the development of our service offering in the pharmaceutical market: Crest Cellulose is not only a perfect fit from a product portfolio point of view, but it will also help us strengthen our geographic presence in Asia to better serve our clients in the region and address a global growing market. We are looking forward to working alongside Crest Cellulose’s talented employees to help our customers address global health challenges.”

Paul Smaltz, Vice President of the Roquette Pharma GBU, added: “This strategic investment strengthens Roquette’s global leadership as an excipient supplier, in line with our ambitions. With its manufacturing plant designed and built according to the highest pharma standards and quality systems, Crest Cellulose will enlarge our cellulose-based excipients offering to customers with superior solutions and will bring us closer to our customers in India and the whole of Asia”.

Madan Mohan Reddy, Director of Crest Cellulose, added: “We are happy to partner with Roquette in furthering growth of Crest Cellulose by way of majority divestiture. Through this transaction, we believe both our employees and the excipient business will thrive under Roquette majority ownership and leadership. We sincerely appreciate the countless contributions of our team through the incubation of Crest Cellulose in bringing out an unprecedented world class facility for the manufacture of excipients. Roquette has a proven track record in the area of excipients globally and we are confident they will leverage this transaction to create long term value for all stakeholders. We are also confident Roquette will continue to develop Crest Cellulose to an international level while also executing on existing customer commitments. Together, we are stronger than individually."

As the majority shareholder, Roquette will have a controlling stake and manage the day-to-day operations of Crest Cellulose.