How Hyderabad's pharma logistics ecosystem is preparing for the next

“Cold just doesn't mean cold. There is a specific temperature range that must be maintained. If it goes up and down, we have a challenge.”

These are the words of Amritendu Mukherjee, Head of Global Logistics at Dr Reddy's Laboratories. For him, one of the biggest advantages of Hyderabad is not simply the addition of cold-chain infrastructure but the understanding of what a pharmaceutical cold chain actually means.

Dr Reddy's logistics network handles three broad product categories: finished formulations, active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and biosimilars, giving Mukherjee a view across both conventional pharma and more temperature-sensitive products.

“The awareness of all the parties in Hyderabad about handling pharma is very high. Logistics service providers, the airport and government authorities all understand the requirements of pharma.”
Amritendu Mukherjee, Dr Reddy's Laboratories

Biologics changes the equation
That distinction matters because Hyderabad's and India’s next phase of pharmaceutical growth will be more demanding than the one that created its generics and API base.

The ₹10,000-crore, five-year Biopharma SHAKTI programme announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in the Union Budget 2026-27 aims to strengthen India's biologics and biosimilars ecosystem, including research, clinical trials and manufacturing, while reducing import dependence.

Thus, Gopal Lakkireddy, Senior Vice President - Biotechnology at MSN Laboratories, sees the 2025-2030 patent cliff as an immediate opportunity in biologics, and Hyderabad is positioning itself around manufacturing. “Hyderabad is now seeing the investments and the ecosystem put in place over the last decade coming to light,” says Lakkireddy. He points to Hyderabad's established vaccine base, Genome Valley, India’s first organised life sciences R&D and manufacturing cluster, and the movement of traditional small-molecule companies into biologics as signs of that transition.

MSN itself is building an oncology-focused biologics business around monoclonal antibodies and other biotherapeutics, with R&D in place and manufacturing readiness targeted within about a year.

A pharma-aware ecosystem
The shift is also visible from the Contract Research, Development and Manufacturing Organisation (CRDMO) side. Chandan Shirbhayye, Vice President and Head of Supply Chain & Operational Excellence at Aragen Life Sciences, says Hyderabad is no longer defined only by the presence of generic pharmaceutical companies. Global Capability Centres (GCC) have brought multinational pharma customers physically closer to the city's service providers.

Aragen operates as a CRDMO serving global innovative pharmaceutical companies, which means its supply chain is driven less by finished medicines and more by research chemicals, reagents, building blocks and novel samples moving between customers and development programmes.

“The CRDMOs themselves have expanded, and the best part is the local supply ecosystem has also improved,” he says. “A lot of companies have put up their distribution point, authorised partners in the form of distributors or stockists, or their own warehouse within Hyderabad to improve their services and turnaround time.” That clustering changes supply chains in small but consequential ways. Having a reagent or critical input available from a Hyderabad warehouse rather than from another city reduces lead time. A customer with people on the ground can interact more closely with the CRDMO. A logistics provider serving several pharmaceutical manufacturers begins to understand the industry's handling requirements without having to be educated from scratch for every shipment.

Mukherjee considers accumulated knowledge one of Hyderabad's greatest advantages. “The ecosystem is ready. The awareness of all the parties in Hyderabad about handling pharma is very high,” he says. That awareness extends beyond logistics companies. “Logistics service providers, the airport, government authorities, they all understand the requirements of pharma.”

He gives the example of regulatory inspection. If a sample has to be checked, he says, officials understand that this cannot casually expose a temperature-sensitive shipment to ambient conditions. “They go to that particular temperature room and ensure that there is no exposure to the product while they are taking out the sample. This awareness is very important when people are handling the product across different stakeholders.”

“In the last four and a half years I have been here, none of our cargo is getting offloaded, just-in-time clearance is happening, and there are very few customs queries.”
Arunkumar Chakkingal Nair, Cohance Lifesciences

The airport advantage
For Arunkumar Chakkingal Nair, Senior General Manager (Head of Global Logistics and Trade Compliance) at Cohance Lifesciences, that familiarity translates into something even more valuable to a shipper: time.

Cohance's business spans APIs, pharmaceutical CDMO services and agrochemicals across 14 manufacturing facilities, concentrated largely in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, with an API unit in Ankleshwar, Gujarat.

After spending years working in Mumbai before moving to Hyderabad, Nair noticed a substantial difference in how pharmaceutical cargo is handled. He points particularly to airport infrastructure, customs facilitation and clearance speed. “Even cargo which I move from 200 kilometres away is getting cleared on the same day,” he says. The consequences become more serious as temperatures become tighter. Recalling a 2-8°C oncology shipment that was held up elsewhere for several days, he says passive packaging has a finite life. “Once it is melting down, it will not maintain the same temperature. Here, comparatively, you get better facilitation for pharma.”

His experience in Hyderabad has been markedly different. “In the last four and a half years I have been here, none of our cargo is getting offloaded, just-in-time clearance is happening, and there are very few customs queries.”

GMR Hyderabad International Airport (GHIAL) was the first Indian airport to establish a dedicated pharma zone for temperature-sensitive cargo, supported by temp-controlled storage and cool-container handling. GHIAL handled about 187,000 tonnes of cargo in FY2025-26. GMR Airports describes this as the airport’s highest-ever annual cargo volume, up 8% year-on-year. In May 2026, the airport commissioned the 16,864 sqm Cargo Terminal 2, with an initial capacity of 50,000 tonnes per year, including a fully temperature-controlled pharma zone with continuous monitoring and dedicated import, export, build-up, and breakdown areas. The addition brought Hyderabad airport's available cargo handling capacity to about 200,000 tonnes annually. Capacity expansion is not stopping there: Cargo Terminal 1 is being expanded with additional domestic and international courier/express and perishables infrastructure, which is expected to bring the airport's overall cargo capacity to around 300,000 tonnes per year. CT2 itself has also been designed with room to double its initial capacity to 100,000 tonnes as demand grows.

The airport is also looking beyond infrastructure to strengthen Hyderabad's international pharma cargo links. For instance, In September 2026, GHIAL and Brussels Airport signed an MoU to explore stronger cargo cooperation and connectivity, linking Brussels' pharma-logistics expertise with Hyderabad's life-sciences ecosystem.

Yet Hyderabad's pharmaceutical supply chain cannot be understood through its airport alone. The manufacturing base produces very different logistics requirements, and companies build their networks accordingly. Mukherjee says around 70% of Dr Reddy's shipments move by sea and 30% by air, with Hyderabad handling most of the air movements. Cohance, meanwhile, has a different mix. With about 90% of its revenue coming from overseas markets, the company also uses Hyderabad as its main air gateway and Nhava Sheva for ocean exports, with roughly 60% of movements by air, 30% by sea and 10% by domestic road.

“The gateway for courier companies is Bengaluru, and that creates a lot of pressure on us because the shipments have to travel by road to Bengaluru and from there they fly out, or vice versa.”
Chandan Shirbhayye, Aragen Life Sciences

Small shipments, high stakes
CRDMO logistics can look different again. Shirbhayye says the business involves large numbers of very small shipments, including reagents, building blocks and novel compounds moving between research teams. They handle 700 to 800 inbound and outbound courier shipments per month, with packages often weighing only 1 to 1.5 kg.

A one-kilogramme CRDMO shipment, however, can carry a value that its physical size does not reveal. “These are all novel chemicals. These are not commercially available chemicals,” Shirbhayye explains. “My customers synthesise these chemicals or create these samples over their last eight or 10 months of study, and then they send them to us for further studies and processing. If the quality gets compromised, it is not a matter of getting the replacement so easily.”

That makes routing, transit handling and the ability to replenish temperature-controlled media during a journey critical rather than incidental. It also exposes one of Hyderabad's connectivity gaps. While Shirbhayye is positive about the city's airport and says its cold-chain capability has improved enormously, much of the international express network used by CRDMOs is still organised around gateways outside Hyderabad.

“The gateway for courier companies is Bengaluru, and that creates a lot of pressure on us because the shipments have to travel by road to Bengaluru and from there they fly out, or vice versa,” he says. Air cargo can leave Hyderabad directly, but courier shipments may still be routed through Bangalore, Mumbai or Delhi before joining international networks.

GMR is now trying to narrow that gap. The city’s airport already has interim infrastructure for handling courier cargo and is developing a dedicated courier terminal with an annual handling capacity of around 30,000 tonnes. Efforts are also underway to bring a courier operator into the Hyderabad gateway. The scale of the opportunity is significant as estimates indicate that around 40 tonnes of courier cargo originating in Hyderabad currently moves to Bengaluru every day.

Finding a route to the sea
For larger ocean shipments, Hyderabad's geography creates another supply-chain calculation. There is no seaport next door, so the effectiveness of inland connectivity becomes central to the city's competitiveness.

Both Dr Reddy's and Cohance are increasingly using rail as part of that answer. Mukherjee prioritises Nhava Sheva and says the choice of port ultimately follows service availability, particularly shipping-line connectivity to western markets. He also sees rail as more than a cost alternative to trucking. “The mode of transport has two aspects. One is the transportation cost and the second is the carbon footprint that road creates,” he says. “In comparison to road versus rail, my carbon footprint is lighter. I think it is a more sustainable mode of transport.”

In October 2025, DP World and Ocean Network Express (ONE) launched Hyderabad's first dedicated reefer rail service from ICD Thimmapur to Nhava Sheva, offering a fixed weekly connection for temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical cargo, with each train able to carry up to 43 forty-foot containers under continuous temperature control, giving manufacturers access to the greater vessel frequency available on the west coast.

Temperature-controlled ocean freight, however, faces another constraint: reefer-container availability. Nair says only one shipping line is keeping reefer inventory in Hyderabad, leaving manufacturers dependent on boxes brought from Nhava Sheva when local equipment is unavailable. He estimates that positioning more reefers at Hyderabad's inland container depots could save two to three days. Cohance uses rail for general containers but continues to move critical 2-8°C and -20°C cargo by road.

More recently, in May 2026, Maersk and CONCOR launched a weekly reefer rail service from Hyderabad to Nhava Sheva for pharmaceutical exporters, using 40-foot refrigerated containers with dedicated equipment allocation and priority handling.

The gaps in the next supply chain
This is where Hyderabad's next logistics challenge begins to emerge. The city has built considerable capability around its existing pharmaceutical industry. Biologics will stretch that capability into new territory.

Lakkireddy points to dependencies at both ends of the biologics supply chain. On the inbound side, manufacturers continue to depend heavily on the US and Europe for consumables, filters, single-use systems, purification materials and other inputs. On the outbound side, biologic products may require 2-8°C,-20°C, or even-80°C conditions. “Importing materials is a big pain, both from the cost and timeline perspective,” he says. “Things that used to take weeks are now taking months, and we are paying prohibitively expensive costs just because we don't have manufacturing set up in India for these starting materials.”

Exporting introduces the reverse problem. “Most of the biologic products have to go in the cold chain. They go either frozen, less than -20, -80, or they go at 2-8 degrees centigrade in refrigerated conditions.”

Hyderabad's manufacturing ecosystem is therefore currently developing faster than parts of the supply ecosystem that will have to feed it. “In Hyderabad, whatever is happening is about product manufacturing,” Lakkireddy says. “Starting materials are the challenge, be it packaging materials or raw materials.” He sees a threshold problem: until biologics manufacturing reaches sufficient scale, investors may not find local manufacture of many specialised inputs commercially attractive.

Shirbhayye sees the same dependency from the CRDMO perspective. Biopharma expansion requires more than reactors and manufacturing buildings. Hardware, filtration and purification equipment, consumables and direct materials often still come from outside India. “None of the OEMs, reactors, filtration equipment, purification equipment — nothing is made in India. Everything is imported,” he says. The dependency then continues into consumables and specialised materials. That becomes a disadvantage when a research-driven industry is expected to react to customer requirements in days rather than months.

“From Hyderabad’s strong vaccine base, Genome Valley and an established pharma manufacturing ecosystem, biopharma manufacturing is now picking up.”
Gopal Lakkireddy, MSN Laboratories

Building the next layer
The challenge is therefore shifting from whether Hyderabad has pharma logistics infrastructure to whether that infrastructure can become more specialised without making Indian pharmaceuticals prohibitively expensive.

Mukherjee argues that throwing more expensive equipment at temperature control is not necessarily the answer, particularly for an industry in which generic-drug economics remains important. An active temperature-controlled solution may technically solve a problem, but its cost can become disproportionate to the value economics of a generic product. He points to reusable thermal blankets and PCM-based solutions as examples of approaches that could protect cargo during vulnerable points such as apron exposure without automatically requiring the most expensive intervention.

Mukherjee also wants airports to disclose and analyse temperature-related incidents more systematically, so manufacturers and handlers can see where failures occur and where investment should be directed. Shirbhayye wants regulations that distinguish between research-scale CRDMO imports and commercial shipments. Lakkireddy says logistics systems must recognise that “biologics are different” from small molecules, particularly as storage requirements can extend to -80°C and below.

Hyderabad’s next advantage will depend on whether it can turn its existing pharma logistics know-how into the more specialised capabilities needed for ultra-cold biologics, faster CRDMO flows, localised inputs, stronger express connectivity, efficient rail-linked exports and cost-effective temperature control.

This article was originally published in the Indian Transport & Logistics News' September-October 2026 issue.