Cover Story - Interviews (1-4)
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Kiran Mazumdar Shaw - CMD, Biocon
"Technology helps us in building diversified portfolio, thus creating wealth"
How is Biocon using technology to stay ahead of the curve?
Since its inception, Biocon has been leveraging technology to stay ahead of the curve. We entered the biopharma space at a time when the prevailing business ethos favoured low-risk ventures based on generic drugs and pharma services. As a pioneering and innovation-led biopharma enterprise, Biocon was among the first entities in India to invest in developing recombinant DNA and bio-processing technologies that could deliver innovative and affordable biologics. Biologics such as insulins and monoclonal antibodies are a class of highly effective transformational life-saving drugs, targeted at chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer.
Today, 7 out of the 10 top selling drugs globally are biologics. At Biocon, we have built technological capabilities and expertise to develop a rich portfolio of novel biologics and biosimilars, or follow-on versions of original biologics, with economical scalability and high productivity, coupled with high quality. We have also set up state-of-the-art, world class manufacturing facilities that provide us with a global scale for producing these cutting-edge therapies. We were, thus, the first to provide the benefits of high quality affordable alternatives to reference biologics for patients in India and other emerging markets. Biocon is now the fourth largest insulin producer in the world.
By prudently leveraging technology, we have built among the largest and most diversified portfolios of biosimilars, spanning monoclonal antibodies, generic insulin and insulin analogs,as well as other recombinant proteins. The portfolio addresses many critical chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer and autoimmune disorders. The clinical and regulatory developments with respect to our biosimilars' portfolio have positioned Biocon among the first wave of companies to be able to address the biosimilars opportunity in the developed markets. Our biopharma strategy is balanced between biosimilars on the one hand and novel programmes on the other.
We have commercialised two path breaking monoclonal antibody drugs: Nimotuzumab for the treatment of head & neck cancer; and Itolizumab for psoriasis. Other exciting novel programmes include our oral insulin candidate, Insulin Tregopil, and fusion or bi-specific antibodies for treating various aggressive cancers.
How has adoption of new technologies helped the pharmaceuticals industry in the country to grow?
Over the past couple of decades, the adoption of disruptively innovative process engineering has helped the Indian pharma industry drastically bring down the prices of vaccines and life-saving drugs used to treat diseases such as HIV, TB and diabetes, globally. ‘One in five’ generic drugs sold in the world today are of Indian origin and 'one in three' children are immunised with a 'Made in India’ vaccine. Pharmaceuticals is the second largest sector in India after Information Technology in terms of its recognised global stature and impact on global healthcare.
The industry has also created a global scale manufacturing sector, which has enabled the development of specialised skills that have provided India a competitive advantage globally. The availability of high end scientific talent and expertise in Chemical synthesis has enabled the Indian pharma industry to become a global provider of generic pharmaceuticals, thus, earning the reputation of the country being the ‘Pharmacy of the World’. By providing affordable generic formulations we have enabled easy access of drugs to patients across the world, and have also helped the healthcare systems in these countries to bring down their healthcare spends.
The adoption of latest technological advances, is enabling Indian medical device makers to target significant growth prospects in this area. The Indian pharma industry is also eyeing the opportunity arising from technological advances in cutting-edge areas, like stem cell therapy, 3D bio printing, immuno-oncology, etc. Some companies are also leveraging the potential of genomics and Big Data analytics, while others are focusing on the growth potential in the area of biomarkers and companion diagnostics, which is the future of new medicine that will personalise therapy and optimise the benefits of biotech drugs. To support these programmes, companies are increasing their R&D spends, and innovation led companies like Biocon invest nearly 12-15% of their revenues in R&D.
Do you see spending on technology equating to a considerable percentage of revenue going up substantially, in the times to come?
Globally, pharmaceutical R&D is witnessing a transition from small molecule chemical compounds to large molecule biologics, along with the implementation of a sophisticated informatics and Big Data infrastructure. The cost of new drug development continues to rise, with some estimates saying that it takes over US$1 billion and upto 12 years to take a new chemical entity (NCE) from the lab to the market. Going forward, R&D spending as a percentage of revenue is expected to increase globally. However, there is likely to be a difference in the rates of growth, with R&D spending in Asian countries likely to grow faster than that of North American and European.
Ashishkumar Chauhan - MD & CEO, BSE
"Technology helps us to create wealth"
As technology is something which BSE is proud of, how much do you spend on technology as a percentage of revenue?
We spend close to 12-15 per cent of our total revenues on technology. Basically, after employees' cost, technology cost is the highest. So, if you put both the costs together, it would be close to 25-30 per cent of our total revenues that go into our technology-related activities. So, if you look from our total cost perspective, because we have around 50 per cent margins, almost 50-60 per cent of our total cost are basically technologyoriented. But that is also low on scale to what we operate because of the fact that recently or during last three-four years we have gone for open source in a big way. So our trading system is on open source, our data warehouse is on open source and many of our critical systems are now on open source, which has reduced our total cost of ownership. Today, large organisations like Google, Facebook and Twitter are working primarily on open source technology and that’s what motivated us to explore usage on open source in our trading system.
Do you think in the next few years, companies will spend more on tech than human resources--will tech have a final say when it comes to doing business?
Humans will continue to remain important because ultimately everywhere humans finally run the technology. So humans running the technology are also technology expenses. Technology people are also a technology cost, not only cost of hardware or software or network but also of the people who can actually effectively run it well. Our technology is not very generic, it is a very specific kind of software programming that happens within it and scale and all of which are amongst the best in the world.
That’s why we also need the best people in the world to operate and modify these softwares and all. Humans will remain important for pretty long time in running of an action. Of course, large part of our orders today are from the robots or from the computerised systems which are not even run by humans. That is true with our systems also. They run the system and only when there is a problem you need people to solve it but still the expertise that you require is of a very high calibre.
In the coming future, can we see Artificial Intelligence playing major role in the functioning of financial markets?
In the current scheme of things, more and more financial services industry is turning towards Artificial Intelligence to do the jobs humans have done over the years. Especially this change is seen more towards the customer-facing side rather than from the exchange side. Exchanges do make use of AI as it helps them in monitoring and functioning of exchanges and at the same time make markets more efficient. Whereas, on the broker side, there has been lot of work done on technological front be it use of AI, algorithms and robot-trading. So, effectively, its the brokers who innovate, much often expanding their horizon to different areas. There are numerous brokers and everyone tries to be one up on the other, and in doing so they tend to innovate further and at the same time learn from other countries, other brokers and so on and so forth.
What are the new technologies that BSE is currently working on?
BSE is continuously trying to upgrade, update all its technology because our focus is always very high on high tech areas. So we will continue to invest in newer hardware and software and even currently our response time is just six micro seconds which is fastest in the world. But we are aware that other people will be even faster after five years and so we have also started trying to modify our systems to get into nano second range. Our network systems are being upgraded, our memories for the data storage systems are getting upgraded and we are also trying to use radical intelligence for new products. There are many changes which are happening on a continuous basis to keep pace with the market.
How technology is helping BSE to create wealth?
It is all about technology. Because of tech advancements, we are doing extremely well. Regular monitoring of tech-related issues, giving clients legitimate advantages due to advancing technologies, making deals faster, resolving accounts faster--all these are helping us to create wealth at the end of the day.
Ravinder Pal Singh - Head of IT and Innovation, Air Vistara
"Thoughtfulness, innovations beautifully align with Vistara’s tech DNA"
Can you tell us how technology is helping Vistara in achieving cost-efficiencies and in improving operations?
At Vistara, technology is viewed as one of the key drivers for generating revenue and optimising costs. Vistara is India’s first airline that is born on Cloud (IT). We invest in commodity platforms with equal zeal as in open source platforms, depending on the specific requirements. Vistara’s core values include thoughtfulness and innovation that beautifully align with our tech DNA.
Vistara is developing robust technology systems to support enhance our operational excellence and support engineering, commercial and digital marketing functions while synergising it with the inward-facing functions such as HR, Finance and Compliance. In nutshell, use of Technology help us stay ahead of the curve.
As the ways in which business is conducted are going through a period of evolution globally, how do you see the role of technology evolve in the airline industry?
A few months back, I predicted a trend in that successful airlines will differentiate themselves from competitors by investing heavily in Artificial Intelligence, and in particular, in bots, in Mobility Landscape and in New Distribution capability (NDC). The airline distribution space is gradually making headway towards a more dynamic and nimble model where airlines are in control, travel agents empowered, and Global Distributions System provided with an opportunity to build new products and services.
I can also stick my neck out and say that Blockchain technology, which relates to Bitcoin transactions, will have an indirect impact on the ecosystem of airline industry commerce. Cloud and mobility are legacy, and modern, lean companies have already adopted it. Blockchain technology can take the hassle out of airline identity management and could revolutionise identity management in combination with Aadhar technology. In my view blockchain has the ability to turn airline miles into something much more pervasive and valuable outside the defined boundaries of airlines and their limited partners with whom passengers get to spend their miles. Imagine if your miles were accrued in real-time, and there was community-driven market place for you to use them instead of the limited spend options made available by individual airlines .
What are the new or upcoming technological innovations in Vistara?
We have incubated an Innovation team which works closely with the Tata Group Technology Innovation Office. The idea behind this move is to tap into the creativity and collective genius of our employees and mobilise them to generate innovative ideas for strengthening and streamlining processes. In Vistara we operate with the understanding that technologically innovative solutions do not necessarily have to be tied to expenditure, and that the company culture can be sculpted in a way that helps technology help us! We are also exploring the usage of Artificial Intelligence, and some cool concepts in the area of content redistribution and customer mapping.
What level of technology is being used by Vistara for its daily operations and how is it helping the company?
We have laid a strong foundation of sophisticated and modern technological tools, with a vision for long-term sustainability. We have deployed the best technology in the industry to give our customers a seamless flying experience. We have technological solutions by such as Amadeus, TCS, SITA, SABRE and MERLOT for various aspects of our operations. Our GDS: Travelport, Amadeus, Abacus are also the best in the industry and we have been the front runners in this space to give a highly modern edge to our airline.
How does usage of technology impact the end-user, i.e, Vistara’s customers?
Despite being a start-up airline, we have a good understanding of how technology can be best leveraged to enhance customer experience. In today’s day and age, at every step in a customer’s journey with an airline, from the point at which they search for tickets, till the point wherein they land at their destination – technology plays a crucial role. At Vistara, we have ensured that at each of these touchpoints, the technology at play is intuitively thoughtful, and aligns with the customer’s needs. This directly translates into a smooth end-user experience
Prabal Basu - Chairman & Managing Director, Balmer Lawrie & Co.
"Innovation breeds business needs technological innovations to be sustained on a long term basis."
As the ways to do business is evolving across the globe: how do see the role of technology?
Technology in business is a growing necessity. As the years go by, the business world is leaning more and more towards it, making it almost impossible to separate the two from each other. The role of technology in business caused a tremendous growth in trade and commerce. Business concepts and models were revolutionized as a result of the introduction of technology. This is because technology gave a new and better dimension to do business in a more effective way. It provided a faster, more convenient, and more efficient way of performing business transactions. Innovation breeds business, and since technology paves the way for it, it is felt that business needs technological innovations/developments to be sustained on a long term basis.
How tech innovations can change companies like yours which are into diverse areas of business operations?
Technology and Digital innovations have profound impact across industries. Innovation leads the way to success in this digital age. Innovation in business means doing something different, smarter or better that will create a positive impact in terms of value, quality or productivity by using emerging or proved technologies of the world. The technology which has already proved itself in last two decades is of course the information technology (IT). It has dramatically changed the lives of the individuals and organisations.
Currently online shopping, digital marketing, social networking, digital communication and cloud computing etc are the best examples of change which came through the wave of information technology. Accurate business planning, effective marketing & sales, systematic management, real time monitoring, instant customer support and long term business growth cannot be achieved at the optimum level without IT. In a highly diversified conglomerate like Balmer Lawrie, we see tremendous opportunities for technological innovations both in respect of IT and R&D / other technical areas.
Our plan is to invest in these areas in the next couple of years to make this company attain its growth aspirations. We are also looking into areas like digital marketing of our products and services to drive growth agenda of the Company.
Do you see companies like yours increasing their spending on technology in coming future?
Absolutely! We have been and will continue to invest more and more in R&D and technology to drive competitive advantage for us in the market place. It is impossible to attain long term business success without leveraging the benefits of technology, especially in this digital age. The companies have to bear a reasonable cost to achieve this success. As technology solutions continue to increase the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of business operations and communication, business will continue to rely and invest in its development and implementation for success.
How dependent is Balmer Lawrie on the use of technology in its business operations?
Rather than being dependent we see this more as an opportunity for us to leverage Technology for growth. Whether pursuing new business models, reengineering operating models, forging new alliances, connecting with customers, or even managing talent/ capability challenges, technology is an essential part of our strategy for growth.
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