Breathing new life into Bharat Serums and Vaccines

A decades-long growth opportunity

Founded in 1971, BSV is a leading Indian biopharmaceutical company focused on the important therapeutic areas of women’s health, critical care, and fertility.

Our journey with BSV began in 2015, a family-owned business, when our Indian healthcare team first met Bharat and Gautam Daftary, the brothers running the company.

Over the following years, we maintained the relationship and continued to monitor the company and its peers. From the outset, we recognized the strength of BSV’s portfolio in Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) and other areas of women’s health.

Advent believed the low investment in women’s health and fertility in India was coming to a long-awaited end and was now set for decades of growth and investment. In BSV, we identified the kernel of a company with the potential to become a domestic champion, delivering research-driven products to save and improve the lives of millions of women, both in India and across the globe. Lifestyle changes, delayed parenthood, and the increase of chronic diseases have seen fertility rates decline by 50% in the last 50 years across the world. In India, increasing awareness of fertility schemes, enhanced government interventions through progressive policies on women’s health and ART, combined with rising incomes and the improved success rate of treatments, has driven the market to a size of over $200M, but penetration rates remain below 1%. These strong tailwinds gave us conviction there would be strong appetite among strategic buyers when it was time for us to pass the baton.

Planning a path to recovery

In 2018, when the family founders initiated a sales process, our relationship with BSV and understanding of the wider Indian and international pharmaceuticals put us in a strong position to tackle the complexity of managing the business.

Advent was able to leverage its deep bench of contacts in the Indian healthcare industry, including Operating Partners Bhaskar Iyer, a former Senior Executive at Abbott, and Abhijit Mukherjee, former COO at Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories. During the year-long sales process, these seasoned operators worked alongside the Advent investment team and Portfolio Support Group (PSG) to assess the company and develop a plan to realize the full potential of BSV from the get-go.

The plan comprised four key transformational levers. First, Advent bolstered the management team, with additional expertise provided by our Operating Partners. Ramping up research and development (R&D) spending was the second key growth lever. Developing an international growth strategy was the third leg of the plan. Finally, we seized the opportunity to run the company more efficiently and devised a domestic go to market strategy, which involved commercializing the product pipeline in the home market.

Breathing new life into BSV

When Advent completed the investment in early 2020, we knew the scale of the task ahead of us. What Advent couldn’t foresee was the global pandemic that would soon grind the global economy to a halt. India was no exception. Advent had acquired a majority stake in a family-run business built around two founding brothers. The commitment to science and the portfolio of products they had created was impressive. However, it was clear that the management, governance, and commercial strategy would need significant attention over the course of our investment.

“A key part of the Advent playbook in India remains backing founder and family-owned businesses and transforming them into management and board-driven companies. BSV is a clear case in point,” shared Shweta Jalan, Managing Partner at Advent. “In conjunction with our Operating Partners and PSG, we immediately embraced the task of enhancing the senior team and governance structures to support incoming CEO Sanjiv Navangul.”

Navangul brought vast experience to the table. Previously, he had served on the board of Johnson & Johnson India and Fulford India. As the pandemic raged worldwide, BSV hired and onboarded new members of the management team in a span of six months – a feat that would have been next to impossible without our established presence on the ground and deep roots in the Indian healthcare vertical. Next, the team set about a complete overhaul of operations.

The company had never implemented a go-to-market strategy. Again, we backed management to build it from the ground up. With the support of the Advent ecosystem, we provided additional resources to the sales team and revamped the go-to-market strategy to focus on a set of mandate brands with compelling potential throughout India. The same rigor was applied to R&D, which was re-focused on building a best-in-class pipeline across the four technology platforms on which all our core products had been built.

International expansion was based on creating ‘multiple home markets’ in five countries with the potential to reach USD $100 million in five years of our entry. Advent gathered learnings on cross-border growth from colleagues across Advent, and ultimately shifted the business from an export-led model to one with a robust branded presence on the ground in each of the selected countries. Growth was also bolstered through strategic M&A, most notably through the acquisition of the gynecology and infertility businesses of TTK Healthcare, a pharmaceutical company. The acquisition provided a 20% uplift in BSV’s EBITDA as well as an enhanced product portfolio and R&D capabilities.

A company reborn

When Advent agreed to sell the business to Indian pharma giant Mankind in July 2024, it was virtually unrecognizable to the company we had bought four and half years earlier. It now has an expert management team, a professional board structure, a robust R&D pipeline, a global footprint, impressive line of market-leading brands, a laser-focus on compliance and safety, and most importantly a proven track record of saving and improving millions of lives globally. The leadership team has transformed BSV into a champion in women’s health.

By unleashing a better equipped sales force on a core range of market-leading products and pricing them accordingly, we’ve taken margins from 20% at entry to 30%+ at exit. Just as importantly, we’ve invested heavily to build a better line of treatments that will benefit millions. When the full pipeline comes to market, BSV will boast an impressive IVF treatment portfolio – a key reason Mankind valued the business so highly.