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1. At a Glance
Akums Drugs and Pharmaceuticals makes medicines that other drug companies sell under their own brands. Revenue for the three months to June 2026 was ₹1,167 crore, against ₹1,024 crore a year earlier. That is a rise of 13.9 per cent. Against the preceding quarter’s ₹1,158 crore, the gain was 0.8 per cent. Operating profit was ₹175 crore, against ₹129 crore a year earlier. Operating margin, the share of sales left after running costs, was 15.0 per cent against 12.6. Profit after tax was ₹100 crore.
The quarter had events in it. On 23 July a wholly owned subsidiary agreed to buy Oriflame India’s manufacturing business for ₹56 crore. That deal covers two plants and a leased warehouse. In the same quarter the Income Tax Department passed an assessment order on the consolidated group. It raises a demand of ₹156.02 crore for the block period April 2018 to March 2025. The group has filed an appeal and deposited ₹4.70 crore under protest. Shareholders approved a dividend of ₹3 a share at the annual meeting on 10 July. The company also spent the last of the money raised at its 2024 listing, closing a very long tab.
Contract manufacturing, the arm that makes medicines for other firms, brought in ₹964 crore. That was 18.6 per cent more than a year earlier. Active ingredients at ₹32 crore and trade generics at ₹21 crore both shrank. International branded formulations, at ₹35 crore, shrank as well. Management describes the corporate margin guidance for the year as 14 to 15 per cent.
Cumulative annual formulation capacity stands at 50.6 billion units.
2. Introduction
Akums was incorporated in April 2004 and built its first plant at Haridwar, for tablets and capsules. What followed reads like a company that could never quite stop adding a facility. Oral liquids and sterile products came next, then a nutraceutical unit. Then came Asian markets and a research laboratory in Mumbai. Then dedicated facilities for hormones, cosmetics and dermatology, and one more for beta-lactam anti-infectives and steroids. Every clause in that sentence is a separate building.
In 2021 it bought Parabolic Drugs to enter active pharmaceutical ingredients, the chemicals that do the work in a medicine. It built a dedicated penems facility at Kotdwar for that class of antibiotic. It also launched Akumentis, selling branded medicines under its own name. Plants 1, 2 and 3 hold EU-GMP accreditation, Europe’s certificate of good manufacturing practice. Plant 3 is certified by ANVISA, the Brazilian drug regulator. The company listed on the NSE and BSE on 6 August 2024. A fresh issue of 10,037,708 shares raised ₹680 crore. Selling shareholders offered a further 17,330,435 shares.
Since inception Akums has made 4,146 commercialised formulations across more than 60 dosage forms. In the year to March 2026 it made products for 26 of the top 30 Indian pharmaceutical companies. In the aisle of an Indian chemist, a shopper choosing between two rival brands has a fair chance of putting the same factory in the basket twice.
The recent record is dense with paperwork of the good kind and the awkward kind alike. The year to March 2026 brought 230 filed dossiers, the application packs that regulators require. It also brought 65 approvals from the DCGI, India’s drug regulator, and 169 from the food regulator FSSAI. A first European dossier approval and a first commercial dispatch came in the same year. Separately, the Income Tax Department ran a search and seizure operation in January 2025. It covered offices, manufacturing units and the homes of selected key managerial personnel. The assessment order arrived in the quarter under discussion. As on March 2026 the group had 15 subsidiaries, two of them foreign wholly owned entities, plus a foreign joint venture. Capital spending in the year to March 2026 was ₹222 crore, and management has guided ₹300 crore for the year to March 2027.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
Akums is a contract development and manufacturing organisation. That is the industry’s dignified way of saying other companies put their name on the box and Akums makes what goes inside. The arm was about 80 per cent of revenue in the year to March 2026. In the three months to June 2026 it was 82.6 per cent.
The dosage-form list is where things get delightful. Tablets, capsules, liquid orals and vials are on it. So are ampoules, blow-filled seals, topical preparations and eye drops. Dry powder injections are there, and so, with the straightest possible face in an official business profile, are gummies. More than 60 dosage forms in all. In-house research has produced the inlay tablet, the tri-layered tablet and the tablet-in-tablet. There is also a bi-layered sustained-release tablet-in-tablet, which suggests somebody in a Mumbai laboratory looked at a tablet and thought: what if two.
Four smaller
