Exiting pharmaceuticals — folding a pillar into the partner (2007)

What selection and concentration folded up

At the core of this decision is the fact that a pharmaceutical business grown for forty years alongside the mills never became an independent pillar of earnings. The path from vitamin synthesis to volume production of coenzymes and on to proprietary drugs — a long search for places to apply milling chemistry — found real success in supplying ingredients, but never won scale in the highest-value activity of all, selling finished drugs. Folding the business into the joint-venture partner was the mirror image of that: the company had neither the stamina to keep selling its own drugs nor a market large enough to justify it. Selection and concentration is the logic of cutting what has not grown, and it is also a decision that hurts, because it means letting go of one strand of the diversification.

What followed shows how far that logic reaches. After withdrawing from proprietary drugs in 2008, the group kept CoQ10 — its emblematic ingredient — as a health-food material, but that too was transferred to another company in 2025, ending fine chemicals. For a company with a stable core business, how much of what it has grown around the edges to keep, and where to let go, is a question that returns at every stage of growth. Read together with the way concentrated investment in overseas milling brought on a different ordeal in the form of impairment, this exit reads as one punctuation mark in a history of choosing, again and again, between diversifying and concentrating.