Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories Limited (NYSE:RDY) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Tushar Manudhane: Okay and secondly. On the overall gross margin used to guide for at least in the past before rev limit in the range of 52% to 55% for the base business and since launch of revenue we’ve seen good at least 250 to 300 bits improvement in the gross margin. So if you could just indicate the gross margin guidance for say ’24 so.

Parag Agarwal: Yeah, first of all we can’t describe a certain portion of a gross margin of the gross margin to a specific product. As you know we manage the business on a portfolio basis and we are launching new products all the time. This quarter again we have launched eight new products and in the next two or three quarters in this year we are going to launch more products so we have to look at the gross margin as a composite. Overall the drivers of gross margin as we know are the price version obviously brings it down but we are seeing softening of solvent prices, we are seeing softening of phrase waste and so on and we’re also seeing favorable product mix. So overall I expect our gross margin to range between 56% to 59% in the next few quarters.

Tushar Manudhane: Interesting. And just on extending to your launch aspect or other two products, if you would like to call out, which could be interesting launches over next twelve to 15 months in North America. I don’t want to call out specific. We’re trying to avoid it because after that we have a lot of discussion on these products. But what we can say is that we believe that we can sustain also the level of activities in North America. Even cost linodulamide because we have quite a few of very high value products that we can bring to the market.

Operator: Thank you. We have the next question from the line of Shyam Srinivasan from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.

Shyam Srinivasan : Good evening and thank you for taking my question. I’m just looking at the sales mix for the quarter. When I look at it, 57% of revenue is coming from the US currently 17% from India. I remember we had some kind of an aspirational goal to narrow this over time, but we seem to have gone the other way. I know there is a linear denied in there which is probably skewing things but it is just your broad guidelines of a more diversified geographic mix. And I’m a little also confused with the India strategy because we keep divesting things like the Eris life sciences or the JB Pharma. So how do we get to top five if we keep divesting? And you mentioned innovation to kind of help you double but I’m just wondering what are these opportunities? Shouldn’t it be more like a transformative M A where we acquire assets like our workout deal perhaps few years back? Right. So there are small so just want to understand your thought process on this.

Erez Israeli: Sure. Thank you so much for the question. Indeed. Minodule might make the US obviously in proportion more than before. I’m a realtor our commitment to the new market actually being a very important market for us and also reiterates the aspiration to bit of five. Now how should we go to bit of five? It’s not because we are going to buy number six. I wish I could, but first, it’s not available. And second, it’s too expensive. And I don’t think our shareholders want us to do that. The way to do that for us is by launching innovation. So we saw that in India there are two trends that are coming up. One, some of the branded generics will have a headwind it in the future. Either because of the trader generic, either because of the digital channels, there will be certain level of potential switches also.

And when we looked at our portfolio and we saw what brands we believe are long term for us, we decided to focus on them and to divest those that we decided to not to focus on. At the same time, we have a major effort to bring a lot of innovative solution to. And once this will pick up, this will bring us to the desired level. Even without acquisitions, acquisition, I’m happy to do with a reasonable price, with a reasonable risk, but we are not building on it. We can be top five even without.