SEAC bought by French holding company

Nufarm said the divestment would allow it to focus on its core crop protection activities, which account for 95 per cent of its revenues. Meanwhile Minakem, formed last December by pharmaceutical industry veterans Frederic Gauchet and Philippe Reulet, said it would use the SEAC acquisition to become a fully integrated company that offers services from research and development up to commercial scale manufacturing.

Based in France, SEAC specialises in the synthesis of fine chemical starting materials, custom manufacturing of key intermediates for the pharmaceutical industry, and the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), as well as providing process and analytical method development.

In time, Minakem plans to use SEAC as a springboard to expand into the US and Asian markets. The company has a turnover of approximately €30m at present and employs upwards of 160 staff at its site in Beuvry-La-Foret, near Lille.

Production at this plant is carried out from bench scale through pilot to commercial quantities in a 150 square metre multipurpose facility, while SEAC also operates a cGMP kilo-lab unit that has been operational since the end of 2000, and provides scale-up work on syntheses investigated at the laboratory scale.

Every year, SEAC has the capacity to develop 80 to 100 varied compounds at lab scale, while between 20 and 30 new intermediates are synthesised at pilot scale (10 to 100kg). In addition, about 60 different products are manufactured at industrial scale (from 100kg to tens of tonnes), for a total quantity of 400 MT per year.