Nine Names Can Still Sell You Ibuprofen
IOL Chemicals told the Indian exchanges on Wednesday that its 12,000-tonne ibuprofen unit is running at 95 percent, and that the 6,000 tonnes it is adding do not commercialise until December 2027. On FDA's current drug master file list, nine holders have an open file on the plain molecule, one of them a South Carolina line that stopped making it last year.
The world's largest ibuprofen plant is running at 95 percent of its nameplate.
IOL Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals put that figure on an exchange filing on Wednesday afternoon, in the box SEBI makes an Indian issuer fill in when it announces a capacity addition. The box directly below it asks when the new capacity arrives.
December 2027.
"Who covers an ibuprofen book for fifteen months while the biggest producer in the world is already flat out?"
What Wednesday's Filing Says
The Regulation 30 intimation runs five pages and carries three projects. The one that matters here is a fully backward-integrated ibuprofen unit at the existing Barnala site in Punjab, 6,000 MTPA, taking IOL from 12,000 MTPA to 18,000, at a stated cost of about ₹350 crore funded from internal accruals.
Annexure-1 is where the useful number lives. Existing capacity utilisation: 95%.
That is the company's own figure, filed under a disclosure rule, about the asset its last annual report describes as the world's largest ibuprofen capacity. Roughly 11,400 tonnes a year of actual output against a 12,000-tonne plate, and the relief is fifteen months out.
IOL then called an investor update for Friday afternoon on a day's notice, telling the exchanges the two-working-day requirement should be waived "in view of the urgent nature of the business update." Companies do not usually describe a 2027 commissioning date as urgent.
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