Sai Life Sciences is increasing investments to deepen partnerships with top pharma companies, aiming to secure long-term revenue through expanded capabilities and strategic growth initiatives amid strong recent financial results.
Sai Life Sciences is betting that deeper, longer relationships with drugmakers will keep more molecules with the company through to commercial manufacture, even as it steps up spending on new capabilities. In an earnings call transcript, chief executive Krishna Kanumuri said customers generally want to keep programmes with Sai Life Sciences for the full product life cycle, with exits usually driven by capacity constraints rather than strategy. Chief financial officer Siva Chittor added that more than 90% of revenue comes from existing customers, underlining a plan to widen the share of wallet by expanding both the scope of work and the mix of services offered. Sai Life Sciences says it already works with 18 of the top 25 innovator pharmaceutical companies and has been involved in more than 10% of small-molecule new chemical entities approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in the past four years.
That customer-stickiness strategy is being backed by a heavy capital programme. Chittor said the company is considering up to ₹1,300 crore of capital expenditure, including a greenfield peptide facility, and that its internal hurdle rates sit above company-level return targets. He indicated that capability-building spend would be difficult to defer unless business conditions deteriorated sharply, although capacity additions could be slowed if demand softened. Sai Life Sciences has said its drug-substance manufacturing network includes 80 production trains and 700 KL of installed capacity, with reactor sizes ranging from 250 litres to 12,000 litres and infrastructure spanning gram to multi-ton scale.
The peptide push is one of the company’s most significant growth bets. Kanumuri said most current peptide work is still in early-stage discovery, although dedicated development and GMP pilot facilities are being readied for clinical supply. He said the larger 2028 site is intended for full commercial capacity, while Chittor estimated total peptide-related spending at less than ₹300 crore through that point. Sai Life Sciences has also been widening its formulation capabilities, focusing on small-molecule oral solids for Phase 1 and Phase 2 clinical supplies, a move it links to customer demand for China+1 supply chains.
The company is also leaning on its overseas satellite centres in Boston and Manchester to support growth, with management saying those sites help win business early and then channel more of the work back to India. Chittor said the Boston office, opened in late 2020, has contributed to discovery revenue growth of 30% to 35% over the past four to five years, while Manchester adds skills drawn from large pharmaceutical companies. That expansion comes alongside robust recent results: Sai Life Sciences reported revenue of ₹21.92 billion for the year ended March 31, 2026, up 29.38% from a year earlier, while profit also rose sharply. Chittor said the company’s 15% to 20% growth target is a three-to-five-year medium-term guide, not a ceiling, and that shipment timing will continue to make quarterly performance uneven.
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