At this stage when India is grasping for breath any small investment should be considered good news. Others are watching and (as our moneyed friends tell us) businessmen like the fact that other businessmen are planning to invest. As the “market sentiment” is boosted more money flows in….and then one (not so) fine day the tide recedes and the money flows out again.
But then what is this we hear about the recent patent dog fights and the imminent threat of sanctions? Big pharma being (very) displeased with India? Guess it is all a riddle wrapped up in an enigma.
Glaxo Smith Kline
said on Monday it had paid 64 billion rupees ($1.05 billion) to
increase its stake in its Indian pharmaceuticals unit to 75 per cent, as
it banks on rising demand for medicines in emerging markets.
Britain’s biggest drugmaker first announced plans to lift the holding in
Glaxo Smith Kline Pharmaceuticals from 50.7 per cent in December. It held
an open offer to buy the extra shares at 3,100 rupees each from Feb. 18
to March 5. Final payment for shares tendered and accepted will be completed by March 20, GSK added.
David Redfern, GSK’s chief
strategy officer, said the decision to increase exposure to the Indian
market was “a significant vote of confidence” in growth prospects for
its business in India.
GSK, which has had a presence in India
for 90 years, is keen to secure a bigger share of India’s growing $14
billion-a-year market, which it views as promising despite recent moves
to impose price cuts and limit patents on some medicines. The open offer was managed by HSBC.
regards
Published by
Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive
