Former pharmaceutical plant of Rosta Group bought by manufacturer of anti-snoring spray

The pharmaceutical plant, which belonged to the bankrupt Rosta Group, has finally found a buyer after several attempts. The new owner is Mirrolla, one of the largest manufacturers of dietary supplements

The Mirrolla company has become the main owner of Pharma Capital LLC, which has a pharmaceutical warehouse and a drug manufacturing plant in St. Petersburg on its balance sheet. The company's owner changed on October 17, according to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities.

We are talking about pharmaceutical production in the Konnaya Lakhta industrial park, which once belonged to a large pharmaceutical distributor and former owner of the Raduga, Pervaya Pomosh and Ladushka drugstore chains — the Rosta JSC group, founded by David Panikashvili and subsequently bankrupt. In 2016, the businessman pledged the assets of the pharmaceutical plant to Sberbank, and after the bankruptcy, the financial institution transferred them to the Pharma Capital company, the industry publication Pharmvestnik wrote. The latest available financial statements say that at the end of 2021, 99.99% of Pharma Capital itself belonged to Nefteservis LLC, a Sberbank structure. Other parties associated with Pharma Capital were companies that are part of the Sber group, its reports said.

At the moment, information about the plant's previous owners is hidden. But, judging by the information published on the website of the Russian Auction House (RAD), they are the Sberbank-related companies SBK Aktiv and Nefteservis.

RBC sent a request to Sber. Mirroll, commenting on the acquisition of Pharma Capital, reported that the company will continue to operate pharmaceutical production according to international standards (GMP). The company declined to comment further.

What is the asset known for?

The plant in the Primorsky District of St. Petersburg includes a production and warehouse complex with a total area of ​​20.4 thousand square meters and a land plot of 2.3 hectares under it. The capacity of the enterprise is estimated at 1.2 billion tablets per year, according to the presentation of the facility on the website of the Sber-A electronic trading platform. It also says that the enterprise provides services for contract manufacturing of medicines, for the development or adaptation of their production technology, for labeling, packaging and storage of products.

The original owner of the production, the Rosta Group, was one of the five pharmaceutical distributors that launched the state program of additional drug provision in 2005. A year later, the Rosta Group began to engage in the pharmacy business, which it subsequently sold to Erkafarma. At the time of its sale, the Raduga-Pervaya Pomoshch-Ladushka chain included more than 1,000 points with a turnover of 20.2 billion rubles. The plant in St. Petersburg was then engaged in secondary packaging of drugs, the Kommersant newspaper wrote.

In February 2019, the company was declared bankrupt with a total debt of 25 billion rubles. Its main creditors were Sberbank (the amount of claims was about 4 billion rubles), Bayer (over 1.8 billion rubles), Berlin-Chemie/A. Menarini (over 720 million rubles) and Johnson & Johnson (over 600 million rubles). In April of the same year, the Arbitration COURT of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region also declared Panikashvili insolvent (the founder of the Rosta Group died in April 2023).

After the bankruptcy of the Rosta Group and the transfer of its property to the balance sheet of Pharma Capital, the plant was leased to Raduga Production CJSC in 2019. Its owner was Ilya Grigoriev, who is said to be a relative of Panikashvili. Raduga Production produced drugs on a contract basis for the Moscow Region-based Canonpharma Production LLC, but in recent years, the company, based on the data of the Roszdravnadzor registry, has not introduced drugs into civil circulation . In July 2023, Raduga Production was declared bankrupt.

Sberbank structures put the plant up for auction several times, according to data from the RAD and Sber-A platforms. But there were no buyers for it. To increase the chances of a sale, they tried to fill the site with tenants: in March 2021, Kommersant reported that the warehouse premises in the complex would be occupied by the Sber Eapteka service, but the lease agreement, according to Pharmvestnik, was never signed. Later that year, Ivan Glushkov, the former deputy general DIRECTOR of Immunotekhnologii LLC (engaged in promoting the Sputnik V covid-19 vaccine) and who worked for the Stada CIS pharmaceutical holding for more than 15 years, headed Pharma Capital.

Ivan Glushkov told RBC that he left the post of CEO of Pharma Capital a little over a year ago. According to him, the owners of the enterprise had no plans to develop the product portfolio; their goal was to bring the site to a state suitable for sale, to obtain licensing and launch production. "When I went there, the plant was worth much less than they wanted to get for it," Glushkov recalls.

It took a long time to find a contender for the asset because large pharmaceutical companies already have their own production facilities, and for small players this equipment and production volume is too large, Glushkov explains. Initially, buyers were sought among international players who would like to localize production in RUSSIA, but after the start of a special military operation and the Western sanctions imposed in response to it, negotiations with foreign pharmaceutical companies ceased, Glushkov says. According to him, the plant has a valid license to produce tablets and capsules, and since 2022 contract production has been located there - it still has a small volume of contract orders.

The last auction for the sale of Pharma Capital property took place on September 17, 2024. It was held on a downward slope — the starting price of the property was 2.1 billion rubles, the minimum — 1.8 billion rubles. But the procedure was declared invalid due to the lack of applications, according to the auction protocol.

Who became the new owner of the plant?

The Mirrolla company is one of the five largest Russian manufacturers of biologically active additives (BAA) by sales revenue, according to data from the analytical company DSM Group. Its website states that it develops and produces not only dietary supplements, but also functional food for children and cosmetics. For example, it produces Mirrolla vitamins, shampoos (Mirolla Sulsen, 911 Emergency Help), body gels (Badyaga and Zhivokost), essential and cosmetic oils, as well as anti-snoring products "Doctor Khrap'eks". According to financial statements, Mirrolla's revenue in 2023 amounted to 2.6 billion rubles, net profit - 888.4 million rubles.

The largest producers of dietary supplements in Russia

According to DSM Group estimates, a quarter of all dietary supplement sales in Russian pharmacies are accounted for by three companies. The largest manufacturer is Evalar, which occupied 14.5% of the market in value terms in the first nine months of 2024. It is followed by KvadratS (6.1%) and Solgar (6.1%). Mirrolla is in fourth place with a market share of 5.7%.

According to the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, Mirrolla, registered in the Leningrad Region, is owned in equal shares by Gevork Akopdzhanyan and Gaik Arakelyan. The businessmen also own the company Kok Rosh Pharm, which specializes in the wholesale of pharmaceutical products. In addition, they have shares in the company Berlin Stoma, which is assigned the domain of the Stoma Dent dental clinic network in St. Petersburg.

In 2021, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) found the manufacturer of Mirrolla Lab (also owned by Akopdzhanyan and Arakelyan) in unfair competition. The service considered that the packaging and name of the hygiene product Aquasol it produces are similar to the medical product Aqualor from the manufacturer Nizhpharm and issued the company an order to cease the violation, opened a case and fined it 300 thousand rubles. Mirrolla Lab tried to challenge the order and the FAS decision in court, but the Moscow Arbitration Court recognized them as legal. The courts of appeal and cassation confirmed this, and the Supreme Court refused to consider the complaint.

According to an RBC source in the pharmaceutical market, the assets of Pharma Capital were acquired by Mirrolla for 1.8 billion rubles.

How experts assess the plant

There were several attempts to sell the Pharma Capital plant, but several years ago this asset was of no value to pharmaceutical manufacturers, says Nikolai Bespalov, Development Director of RNC Pharma. The site was not suitable for the production of modern drugs - in order to bring the plant into normal condition and organize the production of drugs in accordance with regulatory documentation, the buyer had to invest large amounts of money in it, Bespalov explains. Pharma Capital was a complex asset, including due to technical problems, says Sergey Shulyak, CEO of the industry analytical company DSM Group. Experts do not rule out that the plant may be repurposed for the production of dietary supplements.

The Mirrolla company could have bought a plant specializing in pharmaceutical production because it plans to develop its own pharmaceutical portfolio there, Glushkov believes. The expert sees no point in repurposing it for the production of dietary supplements: “Repurposing the plant for dietary supplements, this plant, is about like transporting concrete in a Rolls-Royce. This is an expensive, very high-quality production in terms of equipment. If dietary supplements are produced on such equipment, they will cost as much as a cast-iron bridge,” Glushkov says.

Investments are beneficial for a company that has a portfolio and wants to quickly launch its production, continues the RBC interlocutor: with investments of about 2 billion rubles (that is how much the plant was put up for auction for), it is possible to build a similar site from scratch, but this will take from three to five years. "And now the buyer immediately received a ready-made site," Glushkov reasons. Perhaps Mirrolla will launch the production of branded generics at the plant - "they are marginal and will allow the facility to be recouped fairly quickly," the expert summarizes.

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