Big plans for Terapia

American financial group Advent International, the new owner of drugmaker Terapia Cluj-Napoca plans to double the company’s sales in the next 4 or 5 years so that it could sell it to a strategic investor interested to expand in Romania after that time has passed and make a profit.

Nearly two months from the takeover of Terapia, the second Romanian drugmaker, Advent International’s representatives cared to provide Ziarul Financiar with details on the plans for their latest acquisition on the Romanian market. Terapia’s takeover was an over $40 million deal.

“Our strategy is to turn Terapia into the leading local drugmaker with an attractive product portfolio, sound sales and marketing capabilities and a twice higher turnover in four or five years from now. We will mainly focus on the domestic market, where we will see significant market share growth due to new product releases, while exports will be primarily directed to Russia and Ukraine,” says Joanna James, Advent International’s managing director for Central and Eastern Europe.

Terapia’s current market share, 3.7%, makes it second top Romanian drugmaker after Sicomed Bucharest and the fifth player on a very fragmented market worth more than 600 million euros a year, behind GlaxoSmithKline (UK), Novartis (Switzerland), Pfizer (US) and Sicomed.

Prior to Advent’s takeover, Terapia had been held by financial investors for four years, which began a complex restructuring process (cutting personnel down to half, putting together a new management team, creating a distribution network, launching new products) Advent will see through. “We and the management have identified at least $10-$15 million in investments that need to be made over the next few years. The money will go to retooling and expansion of productive capacities, to the acquisition of licenses for new products, market and sales investments, as well as to an environment protection investment programme. We are determined to reinvest our entire profit and even make additional financial resources available if necessary,” Joanna James specified.
laurentiu.ispir@zf.ro