Pharmaceutical companies are operating in an environment where demand is becoming increasingly difficult to predict, while product portfolios continue to expand. Building and owning manufacturing facilities for every product may provide control, but it can also make capacity expansion slower and capital intensive.
Asset-Light Manufacturing
This is where asset-light manufacturing is gaining attention. By working with existing manufacturing infrastructure and specialised partners, companies can potentially respond to changes in demand more quickly, access capabilities that may not be available internally and deploy capital towards areas where it can create greater value.
Building Flexibility into Manufacturing Strategies
In his interaction with Siliconindia, Hari Kiran Chereddi, Founder, MD & CEO, HRV Pharma, explores how this approach can help pharmaceutical companies build greater flexibility into their manufacturing strategies. Rather than treating manufacturing capacity as something that must always be owned, the model looks at how existing infrastructure and external capabilities can be brought together around specific requirements.
Challenges of an Asset-Light Model
At the same time, an asset-light model is not without its challenges. Partner dependence, quality control, regulatory oversight and supply reliability become critical when manufacturing is distributed across multiple organisations. The discussion therefore also raises an important question for the industry: whether a hybrid model, combining owned infrastructure with external manufacturing partnerships, could provide a more practical balance between control, flexibility and scale.
Read the full feature in Siliconindia.
