AgroLife Creates a New Area of interest

Best Agrolife, among top 15 agrochemical companies in India, has over 160 employees and a 3,000-plus strong distributor network. It sells more than 70 formulations of various insecticides, herbicides and fungicides and has more than 350 product licences. Its key products include Diron, a third-generation insecticide, Pydon, a novel one-shot whitefly control solution, Dongle, a plant growth regulator, and Byju, a post emergence herbicide for tackling grasses, sedges and broad leaf weeds.

The company, which started off by getting import licences to market some agro-chemical products in India, set up its first formulations unit in 2007. However, right from day one, management’s plan was to identify products where India was totally dependent on imports. In 2016, the promoter group acquired a technical (key active ingredient that is basis of the final product) manufacturing plant and started the process of backward integration. “When we took over this plant in 2015-end, technical production capacity was 700 MT per annum. Today, it is 7,000 MT per annum. A few months ago, the unit became part of the holding company,” says Ailawadhi, who joined the company as a professional in 2017 and is not related to the promoter group.

Best Agrolife’s strategy was simple—identify sought-after products and focus on development and registration. The products began to enter production from 2019. It focuses on 9(3) registrations, a category of production registration where the product is the first to get registered, and will often be the only product in the market. “We already have four-five very big molecules. Some days ago also, we cracked a big molecule, Spiromesifen Technical, India’s first,” says Ailawadhi. Spiromesifen acts as an insecticide and miticide that controls red spider mite in brinjal, whitefly & mite in cotton, european red mite & red spider mite in apple, chili & okra, and yellow mite in chili. While the market in North America, Latin America, Europe, Brazil, Spain and Germany is growing at a moderate rate, there is huge demand for Spiromesifen in Asia Pacific.