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Biocon India plans domestic IPO by June 2002

Biotechnology firm Biocon India Ltd plans a domestic initial public offering of shares by June 2002 to raise money to fund expansion, its chairman said on Tuesday.

"We want to raise funds to expand our capabilities, to invest a lot more in research and to make some strategic investments," Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw said from Bangalore, where Biocon is headquartered.

"We are looking at these (strategic) investments not necessarily in India but overseas," she said.

Mazumdar-Shaw and her family own 70 per cent of Biocon.

ICICI Ventures, India's largest venture capital firm and subsidiary of financial services firm ICICI Ltd, owns around 10 per cent.

"We should be doing $75 million in revenues by March 2002 at Biocon and its wholly-owned subsidiaries, half of it from exports," Mazumdar-Shaw added.

Biocon, founded in 1978, makes a wide range of biotech products including enzymes for industrial use and pharmaceuticals.

It has a US patent on an advanced bio-reactor, intended for use in industrial fermentation.

Biocon's subsidiary Syngene specialises in bio-informatics, developing software for retrieving genetic data.

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