About 81 years ago, Himalaya Healthcare founder M Manal, on his visit to Myanmar (then Burma) discovered a root which was being fed to agitated elephants to pacify them. After intensive research, he launched an anti-hypertensive drug, Serpina, based on that root. That started the journey of Himalaya with a quest to develop Ayurveda to bring it on par with modern medicine and resulted in one of the top selling over the counter products, Liv 52. Ravi Prasad, executive chairman, The Himalaya Drug Company, shares with Soma Das of FE the firm’s plans to foray into Japan, deepen distribution and why the firm, loosely structured like Bose Corp, doesn’t favour listing.
Where does Himalaya?s annual revenues stand? How much does export contribute? Which are the new geographies you are planning to enter in near future?
We have comfortably crossed the R1,000 crore-mark as far as our annual revenues are concerned. Exports already contribute near about 45% of our total revenues and is increasing. As far as geographies are concerned, we have pretty much expanded our footprints to almost all regions whether it is Europe, Eastern Europe, US, Latin America, South East Asia among others. Japan is one market, that we are planning to enter next year. Although, product registration and stringent regulatory pathway remains a challenge.
Three-four years back, Himalaya had plans of expanding its retail business substantially by opening exclusive stores. But we didn?t see it happening really.
The idea was to deepen distribution and that was a definite option which was considered a few years back. But we discovered on way that the ‘shop within shop’ format suits us better, so we tied up with Spencer?s, Nilgiri, Guardian and other reputed pharmacies and have over 1,000 such shops within shops in the country. Also, the pull factor started working and we keep getting queries from chemists spread across asking to stock our products as customers are demanding Himalaya products. That is when we realised that it is no longer necessary for us to have exclusive store everywhere. By the end of next year, we would have deepened our distribution by additional 50%. We also have over 130 exclusive Himalaya showrooms but it is more of a branding strategy.
Doesn’t Himalaya have plans to list on the bourses? If not, could you explain why?
Our’s is a very unique company. We work in the area of Ayurveda and traditional medicine but our processes and discipline is on the lines of chemical pharma companies. For all our drugs, we carry out extensive research, follow complete clinical trials protocols and so on. A lot of creativity goes into running such a company with no precedents and we need that freedom, for instance on decisions like allocating a certain percentage of revenue to R&D.
In that aspect, we are loosely structured like acoustic firm Bose, another innovative firm. The firm has separated the family ownership (Himalaya Global Holdings Ltd) from the professional management of our worldwide operational hubs (The Himalaya Drug Company).
Himalaya Global Holdings is a Manal-family investment entity that does not have any active business operations. It owns assets by virtue of being the parent of The Himalaya Drug Company worldwide.