Anthem Biosciences Limited (ANTHEM) share price
₹934.05 on NSE as of 2026-09-04. -1.75% on the day. market cap ₹52,623 Cr. P/E 91.1. 52-week range ₹592.40 to ₹950.70. Healthcare.
Anthem Biosciences Q1 FY27: A ₹43,859 Cr CRDMO Whose Revenue Just Dropped 22.6% and Whose Profit Barely Flinched
At a glance
Anthem Biosciences closed the June 2026 quarter with revenue of ₹418 crore, down 22.6% from ₹540 crore a year earlier and down 31.5% from the ₹611 crore it booked in March 2026. On most income statements a top line that shrinks by nearly a quarter drags everything below it down too. Here, PAT fell only 11.7%, from ₹136 crore to ₹120 crore, and operating margin actually widened year-on-year to 36% at the quarter level.
Management attributes the softness to timing shifts in customer deliveries rather than falling demand, noting a higher concentration of scheduled deliveries in the back half of the year. On the same July week, ICRA upgraded the company's long-term rating to AA (Stable) from AA- (Positive), citing an 18.1% FY26 revenue rise and margin expansion.
The company remains almost debt-free, with borrowings of ₹54 crore against reserves of ₹2,930 crore, and the market prices it at 73.9x earnings against an industry 48.3x. A CRDMO that reports a shrinking quarter while its rating gets upgraded is an unusual combination. The rest of the entry works through how both things are true at once.
Introduction
Anthem Biosciences was incorporated in Bangalore in 2006 and spent most of its life as a private company before listing on the NSE and BSE in July 2025, raising roughly ₹3,395 crore. It is a Contract Research, Development and Manufacturing Organization — a CRDMO — meaning other companies hand it molecules and it does the discovery, development, and manufacturing work. Its promoters, led by Chairman and CEO Ajay Bhardwaj alongside Dr. Ganesh Sambasivam, K.C. Ravindra and Ishaan Bhardwaj, each carry over 25 years in pharma and biotech.
The recent moves cluster around capacity and capital. Through subsidiary Neoanthem Lifesciences, the company completed Unit 3 in Harohalli, and in February 2026 sanctioned conversion of an additional ₹275 crore loan into Neoanthem equity, taking the total to ₹550 crore. It has broken ground on Unit 4, a greenfield Harohalli facility with a ₹1,200 crore capex outlay phased across FY27 and FY28, which ICRA notes is planned to be funded largely through internal accruals and existing cash.
On the corporate side, the board approved S.R. Batliboi as auditor in April 2026 and sought approval for a ₹127.68 crore promoter payout tied to an investor divestment. General Counsel K. Ramakrishnan resigned effective end of March 2026. FY26 revenue reached ₹2,124 crore with PAT of ₹592 crore, and the company now counts 14 commercialised molecules after adding four in FY26.
Business model
Imagine a pharmaceutical kitchen where the chefs never own the recipe. A biotech in Boston has a promising molecule but no factory, no process chemistry team, and no fermentation tanks. It sends the molecule to Anthem, which figures out how to make it, scales it up through clinical phases, and — if the drug survives its trials — manufactures it commercially. Anthem gets paid at every stage and keeps almost none of the eventual drug's upside. It is the toll booth, not the highway.
The company runs two segments. CRDMO is the core, at 81.5% of Q1 FY27 revenue, spanning target identification, lead selection, preclinical work, clinical-trial batch manufacturing, and commercial supply across both small molecules (NCEs) and biologics (NBEs) — a dual capability the company describes as rare among its Indian peers. The second segment, Specialty Ingredients at 18.5%, makes fermentation-based APIs: probiotics, enzymes, peptides, vitamin analogues including Vitamin K2-7, and nutraceuticals sold across regulated and semi-regulated markets.
The platform list reads like a bingo card of everything modern pharma is excited about: RNA interference, antibody-drug conjugates, peptides, lipids, and oligonucleotides. Ongoing FY25 work spanned 7 ADC programs, 10 lipid-based, 10 peptide-based, 2 RNAi and 1 oligonucleotide program across roughly 242 projects. Over its life the company has run more than 8,000 customer-commissioned programs with 675+ customers.
The catch that comes with being the toll booth is concentration. Per ICRA, the top five products contribute 50–55% of revenue and the top ten customers accounted for 76.4% of FY26 revenue. Geographically, FY25 revenue leaned on Europe at 54.6% and North America at 26.4%, with India at 16.6%. When a handful of clients in a handful of regions carry the business, their delivery calendars become your quarterly results — which is precisely the story of this June.
Quarterly results, balance sheet, cash flow, ratios, shareholding and the filings themselves are on the full page for Anthem Biosciences Limited.
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