Three businesses, stitched together a year ago. Cohance is Advent International's contract-chemistry company folded into Suven Pharmaceuticals, the listed API maker the private-equity firm already controlled; the merger took effect in May 2025. In the year to March 2026, API+ — niche active ingredients and a formulations plant — was 48% of revenue, Pharma CDMO, molecules made to order for innovators, 39%, and speciality chemicals, mostly agrochemical work to order, 13%. The model is the one the sector prizes: paid to do difficult chemistry for companies that own the drug. The year showed its flaw. Customers ran down stocks of two commercial products and about ₹260 crore did not arrive. Revenue fell 13% to ₹2,269 crore; operating margin went from 31% to 19%. Gross margin still improved, to 71% — the chemistry kept its price, the volume went missing. A CDMO's revenue is its customers' inventory policy, one quarter removed.
Better on the pipeline than on the plant. The measures that matter for a contract manufacturer are how full the plants are, how many molecules are moving toward commercial supply, and how dependent it is on a few buyers. Cohance discloses all three, which is rarer than it should be. Plants ran at 55% of annualised capacity in FY26. Over 140 active projects run from Phase 1 to Phase 3, ten of them in Phase 3; requests for quotation doubled during the year; 17 new biotech customers joined the ADC platform. Two molecules moved to commercial supply during the June 2026 quarter, with six intermediates scheduled across the September and December quarters. Twelve regulatory audits in the year, eleven closed — and the US FDA's at Nacharam ended in a Warning Letter. Concentration is the honest number: the top twenty global innovators are over 85% of small-molecule revenue. A pipeline that deep only pays once the plants it feeds are busier than half-full.
Depends what you count, and the company and this page count differently. Bank loans were ₹170 crore at March 2026 — the parent's share two rupee term loans at 6–8%, last instalment due August 2028 — against ₹59 crore of cash and ₹266 crore in mutual funds. On the company's measure that is net cash of ₹153 crore, and ₹251 crore by June 2026. The net debt of ₹341 crore shown above adds ₹231 crore of lease liabilities and counts only cash in the bank. Both are true; neither troubles a business with about ₹3,900 crore of equity — ten paise of debt per rupee of it on the stricter count. The company owes little. Its owner has borrowed against it: 94.6% of the promoter holding was pledged in the June 2026 quarter, for the first time.
Down on every line but one, and the margin fell furthest. Revenue for the year to March 2026 was ₹2,269 crore, 13% below the restated ₹2,609 crore of the year before. Operating margin went from 30.6% to 18.8%; profit fell 63%, to ₹179 crore. The company's own adjusted figure, which strips out ESOP and merger costs, is 21.0% — still a third lower than the year before. The June 2026 quarter was worse than the year: ₹422 crore of revenue, an adjusted operating margin of 2.2%, and a loss. Gross margin held at 71.5%, so the price of the chemistry is intact; what collapsed is the amount of it going through a cost base built for more. A plant half-used is a plant losing money, whatever it charges per kilo.
Backwards, and profit fell four times faster. Revenue for the year to March 2026 was ₹2,269 crore, down 13% from ₹2,609 crore; profit fell 63%, to ₹179 crore from ₹487 crore. There is no longer record to lean on: the company merged in May 2025, and the accounts before FY25 are Suven Pharmaceuticals alone, so a five-year growth rate here would measure the merger, not the business. The June 2026 quarter was worse: ₹422 crore, down 23% on a year earlier and 32% on the March quarter, and a loss — ₹24 crore to shareholders — after NJ Bio, its ADC subsidiary, lost ₹33 crore at the operating level. Management says the shipments slipped into the September quarter, not away. A year and a quarter of numbers, all of them down.
Bought, mostly — and the buying is the strategy. The company itself is an acquisition: Advent's Cohance was merged into Suven Pharmaceuticals in May 2025, which is why revenue appears to rise two-and-a-half times between FY24 and FY25 and why nothing before FY25 compares. Two more followed. Sapala Organics, a Hyderabad maker of oligonucleotide building blocks, 51% bought in July 2024 for ₹258 crore with an obligation to buy the rest; and NJ Bio of Princeton, an antibody-drug conjugate specialist, 56% bought in December 2024 for $64.4 million, about ₹548 crore. Those two are the growth: Sapala's revenue rose 2.5 times in the June 2026 quarter while the rest of the company shrank. They are also the cost — NJ Bio lost ₹33 crore at the operating level in that quarter, and every rupee of it is consolidated. Organic growth is what the acquisitions are meant to produce later.
Worsening, sharply: 30.6% in FY25, 18.8% in FY26, 2.2% in the June 2026 quarter — reported for the years, the company's adjusted figure for the quarter. Gross margin moved the other way over the same stretch — 68.7% to 70.8% to 71.5% — so none of the damage is pricing. It is volume: roughly ₹260 crore of destocked orders and a shut formulations plant left a fixed cost base without the revenue to cover it, and NJ Bio added its losses on top. Management has guided to a second half above last year's. Until then the margin is what an empty plant earns.
5.8%, and a year ago it was 21.9%. That is not good; it is the second-lowest return on capital among the contract manufacturers on this site, above only Piramal Pharma's 1.2% and below Syngene's 8.7% and Shilpa's 11.4%. Anthem earns 29.6% on its capital, Neuland 26.6%. Two things drive it, and only one is the year's weak profit. The other is the denominator: ₹4,312 crore of capital employed, much of it goodwill and plant carried in from the merger and the two acquisitions, earning little yet. Return on equity was 4.6%. Two years ago, as Suven alone, the business earned a fifth on half the capital. It now has twice the capital and less profit than it had then.
Cash kept up better than profit did — but it takes nearly four months to get paid. Operating cash flow was ₹368 crore in FY26 against ₹179 crore of profit, and ₹1,400 crore over three years against ₹967 crore of profit: ₹1.45 of cash for every rupee earned. In the June 2026 quarter, a loss-making one, the company still generated ₹106 crore of free cash by running down working capital. The slow part is collection. Receivables stood at ₹681 crore, or 110 days of sales, and inventory at ₹562 crore, another 90 days. The company puts its net working capital at 154 days, up from 136. Profit is depressed by non-cash charges — depreciation on acquired plant, amortisation of acquired intangibles, ESOP charges. Cash is not. That is the more honest of the two numbers this year.
Every executive who ran the company in FY26 has gone, and the new one has been in the chair since May. Umang Vohra, formerly managing director and global chief executive of Cipla, became chairman on 1 May 2026 and group chief executive on 20 May. He replaces Vivek Sharma, executive chairman until 30 April, who was paid ₹16.18 crore for the year. Before that, the chief executive Sudhir Kumar Singh left in July 2025, the managing director V Prasada Raju in October 2025, and the company secretary in February 2026. The chief financial officer, Himanshu Agarwal, resigned in June 2026 and was relieved on 13 September. Around them: five independent directors, three non-executive directors — two from Advent, the owner, one from the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority — and a board that met eleven times in the year. Five senior departures in fourteen months is not a transition; it is a clean-out. Whether that is the owner fixing something or the owner deciding it is unfixable is the question the next year answers.
The audit is clean. Almost everything else on the page is not. Walker Chandiok & Co, auditors since the 2024 AGM, gave an unmodified opinion on FY26, with one emphasis of matter on how the merger was accounted for — a flag, not a qualification. Contingent liabilities are ₹128 crore on the standalone books, a quarter of it tax disputes, the largest item a ₹74 crore guarantee for a subsidiary. The regulator is the concern. The Nacharam formulations plant was classified OAI by the US FDA and received a Warning Letter in February 2026; the company shut it voluntarily, at a cost it puts at about ₹61 crore of revenue, and US supply has not resumed. Then the rating. On 12 August 2026 CRISIL moved the company from AA-/Positive to BB/Stable "issuer not cooperating" and withdrew it, after three unanswered requests for information in July and August. That may be a lapsed legacy rating on a ₹72.5 crore facility. It is also a company that stopped answering its rating agency in the weeks after its owner pledged the shares.
In small molecules, everyone. In payloads and oligonucleotides, almost no one in India. The base business — intermediates and APIs for innovators, agrochemical actives to order — competes with Divi's Laboratories, Laurus, Neuland, Blue Jet and every Chinese CDMO the customer could have chosen instead; management itself names Chinese generic pressure in agrochemicals as the reason FY27 is a "year of qualification". The edge is what the acquisitions bought. NJ Bio makes the linker-payload for antibody-drug conjugates and does bioconjugation under cGMP in Princeton; Sapala makes the nucleoside and phosphoramidite building blocks for oligonucleotide drugs. None of the listed peers on this site does either, and the customers — 17 new biotech names on the ADC platform in a year — are the ones whose drugs are growing. The edge is real, small and loss-making. The business that pays for it is the one with no edge at all.
By size it sits in the middle of the Indian contract manufacturers: ₹2,269 crore of revenue against Divi's ₹10,560 crore and Laurus's ₹6,813 crore above it, Anthem's ₹2,124 crore and Neuland's ₹2,023 crore just below. By everything else it sits at the bottom. Its operating margin of 18.8% is the lowest of the group bar Piramal Pharma's 10.4%; its return on capital of 5.8% is second-lowest; it is the only one besides Blue Jet and Piramal whose revenue fell. Sai Life and Anthem, the two closest in size, earned 28.8% and 39.3% on sales, 19.2% and 29.6% on capital, and both grew. Cohance's answer is that it is a year into a merger and two acquisitions on a scale the others have not attempted in one year — which is true, and is also why the numbers look as they do.
The tailwinds: a customer restocking order in hand for delivery from the fourth quarter of FY27, two molecules newly in commercial supply, a pipeline of over 140 projects with ten in Phase 3, RFQs that doubled in a year, ADC and oligonucleotide platforms none of its listed peers here has, and cash generation — ₹368 crore from operations in a year when profit was ₹179 crore. Against it: revenue down 13% and a loss in the June quarter, plants 55% used, a US FDA Warning Letter on the formulations site with US supply still suspended, a rating agency walked away from, a chief executive four months into the job after five senior exits, and a promoter who has sold nearly a tenth of the company and pledged 94.6% of the rest. At ₹423.60 on 15 September 2026 the share is 57% below its high of a year ago and still priced at 90 times the depressed profit.
Long-term growth in the part that matters, boom and bust in the part that pays for it. Contract manufacturing for innovators grows with Western drug pipelines and with the wish to buy from somewhere other than China — "China plus one" is named in Cohance's own filings as the reason customers come. That demand is structural, and the newer modalities are where it is concentrated: antibody-drug conjugates and oligonucleotides are among the fastest-growing classes of drug in development, and both need specialist chemistry that few plants anywhere can do. The cycle runs through the other half. Agrochemical actives sold to order follow crop prices and Chinese generic supply, and Cohance's speciality chemicals revenue fell 35% in the June 2026 quarter for exactly that reason. Generic APIs are a price business with no cycle to wait out. The industry outlook, for this company, is the ratio between those two halves — and at 39% for Pharma CDMO against 48% for API+, the wrong half is still the larger one.
About ₹16,200 crore for a company that earned ₹179 crore and shrank. At ₹423.60 on 15 September 2026, across 38.26 crore shares, the market is paying 90 times last year's profit — the same multiple as Anthem, which grew 15% and earned twice the margin — and 7 times sales. What it is really paying for is a profit that has not happened: FY25's ₹487 crore, before destocking, the Nacharam shutdown and NJ Bio's losses. The share has already fallen 57% in a year. That is the market pricing a bad year. It is not pricing a bad owner: the pledge on 94.6% of the promoter stake is worth more than the multiple.
90 times earnings, and the number says less than usual. At ₹423.60 on 15 September 2026 against FY26 earnings of ₹4.68 a share, the P/E is 90.4. Among the contract manufacturers here that is the middle of the pack: Blue Jet at 40 times, Gland and Syngene at 49, Shilpa at 77, Neuland at 82, Anthem at 90, Divi's at 98, Sai Life at 102, Laurus at 118. Price to sales is 7.1, price to book 4.1. The multiple is high because the denominator collapsed. On FY25's profit of ₹487 crore the same market value is 33 times; on a June quarter that lost money it is not a number at all. So the share is cheap if FY25 comes back and expensive if FY26 is the new base — which is the whole argument, and the P/E cannot settle it. What can: the share fell 57% in the year. Somebody has already decided.
Domestic funds bought what the owner sold; small shareholders piled in as the price fell. Foreign institutions held 6.50% at 30 June 2026, from 7.23% a year earlier — a slow drift out. Domestic institutions went from 11.40% to 20.09%, of which mutual funds rose from 8.90% to 18.21%. Together institutions hold 26.59%, up eight points in four quarters. Nearly all of the move came in one quarter, September 2025, when Jusmiral sold 8.9% of the company and domestic funds took most of it. Shareholders numbered 99,149 at 30 June 2026 against 80,910 a year earlier — 23% more owners while the share lost more than half its value. The funds bought a block at a price. The public bought a falling share. Both are now holding the same thing.
Eight holders above 1% at 30 June 2026, and two of them are not institutions. DSP Regular Savings Fund is the largest at 4.28%, then ICICI Prudential's healthcare fund at 4.19%, SBI MNC Fund 3.33%, HDFC Tax Saver 2.16%, SBI Life Insurance 1.75% and Invesco India Contra 1.69%. The two that are not funds are Jasub Property Holdings at 3.84% and Jasti Property and Equity Holdings at 2.51% — the latter held 6.59% a year earlier and has been selling. No foreign fund makes the list. That is unusual for a CDMO of this size and consistent with the foreign holding drifting down to 6.5%. The register is domestic mutual funds and two property holding companies. The new promoter holds 57.5% and has pledged it.
No dividend, no buyback, and a share count that jumped by half — for a merger, not for cash. The board recommended no dividend for FY26 and paid none in FY25. Shares in issue went from 25.46 crore to 38.26 crore, a 50% increase, because 12.65 crore new shares were issued to Jusmiral Holdings, Advent's vehicle, as the price of folding Cohance into Suven Pharmaceuticals. No money came in; a business did. The other direction is worth noting. Jusmiral sold 8.9% of the company in the September 2025 quarter, taking the promoter holding from 66.4% to 57.5%, and by June 2026 had pledged most of what remained. Shareholders were diluted to buy a company. Its seller cashed out nearly a tenth within four months, and has since pledged most of the rest.
A sector, read end to end, and the companies as they are published. Roughly monthly. Nothing else, and one click to stop.
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