Third-party manufacturing, said without the fog

Third-party manufacturing is the ordinary engine of a large part of Indian pharma, and it is still described as if it were a secret. A marketing company has doctors, chemists, or a trade network. A plant has a licence, a line, and room on the calendar. The plant makes the product. The marketing company sells it under a brand the plant will never promote. When this works, both sides get a business they could not have built alone. When it fails, it fails over a sentence nobody wrote down.

The Pharma Partners Private Limited matches those two sides and stays until the sentence exists. We do not manufacture. The batch record stays with the plant. The field force, if there is one, stays with the marketer.

Loan licence is not a synonym

People in the trade say “third party” for several legal shapes. Sometimes the manufacturer holds the product permission and agrees to make the goods for a marketer. Sometimes the marketer holds a loan licence and the goods are made in another company’s premises, under that arrangement, with the paperwork the state licensing authority expects for it. The commercial feeling is similar. The names on the licence are not. We ask which structure you are actually in before we introduce a plant. Turning up with the wrong one wastes the plant manager’s afternoon, and plant managers remember.

A few other questions sort the serious enquiries from the tours. Which dosage forms, in what pack sizes? What monthly quantity, after the first trial order, not during it? Who owns the artwork, and who pays when it has to change because a permission condition changed? What is the credit, in days, and what happens to a batch the marketer then decides not to lift? “We will see” is an answer. It is not an answer a production plan can use.

What we look for in the plant

A current manufacturing licence that covers the dosage form. A GMP position you can show a customer without apologising. A quality person who will talk to the marketer’s quality person directly, rather than through a business-development executive translating both of them. Spare capacity in the month you need, checked with production, not with the brochure. Price comes after those. A cheap strip from a plant that cannot show its licence is not a low-cost strategy. It is a product you may have to pull.

We keep a similar list for the marketer. A real territory, not “all India” said by a team of four. Samples and schemes thought through. The honesty to say which products already sell and which are still a hope. Plants are more open with marketers who talk like that. You can read how we set these conversations up in the note on partnerships, and how a development-heavy project differs in the note on CMO and CDMO work.

If you are a marketer looking for a plant, or a plant looking for marketers who will lift what they book, email info@thepharmapartners.com or call +91 95056 51342. Send the dosage form and the quantity. Leave the adjectives out. The line is busy enough without them.