Lucre's In Sheep's Clothing

While extracting Vitamin D3 from wool has been its mainstay, the firm is looking to move beyond its niche and expand into biotechnology.

- Naini Thaker

The Vitamin D3 manufacturing market in India remains fairly unexplored due to limited raw material—cholesterol in sheep wool—and the complex procedure of extracting it. Many companies have entered and left the business, but there is one B2B Indian firm that has survived for 60 years. Fermenta Biotech, a subsidiary of Duphar Interfran (DIL), currently a 401 crore company, is the only home-grown maker of concentrated Vitamin D3 that is sold to pharmaceutical or food companies, which recalibrate it for their final product.

Extracting Vitamin D3 begins after a sheep is sheared. The animal’s woollen fleece is washed and the dirty water, which contains grease, is put in the centrifuge to segregate it from oil. The cholesterol in the oil is further processed with alcohol and light to draw out the chemical.

The technology to extract Vitamin D3 was brought to Fermenta (then known as International Franchise) by NV Phillips Duphar (Amsterdam) during its joint venture (JV) with Crookes Laboratory UK since the early 1960s. “In 1980, NV Phillips Duphar was taken over by Brussels-based Solvay Pharmaceutical, which then went on to become our JV partner. Fermenta was set up as a subsidiary in 1986 and started operations in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh,” says Prashant Nagre, CEO, Fermenta. The company obtains the raw material from Japanese and European companies.