Director — CDMO Business Finance and Customer Capacity Returns

The mandate

A pharmaceutical contract-development and manufacturing platform is expanding customer programmes that reserve scarce development and production capacity long before commercial volumes are certain. Business finance must evaluate those commitments without treating a customer forecast as a guaranteed production schedule. The director will establish programme economics that connect development effort, qualification timing, reserved slots and payment milestones. Technical and quality leaders supply the delivery assumptions; finance tests the financial consequences and contractual allocation of risk. Attractive unit margins must be examined alongside idle-capacity exposure, programme changes and the cash required before a product reaches repeat production.

The initial twenty-four-month agenda covers customer-capacity commitments, programme profitability and investment cases at two operating sites. This is open-ended employment, with a continuing remit across commercial planning and customer finance after those priorities are established. Fifteen finance and planning professionals will work through the director, producing a consistent view of programme contribution and cash. Models must distinguish recoverable customer-funded work from platform investment, then show how delayed qualification or reduced demand changes the return on a dedicated asset, a shared production slot or an additional development team.

The director holds financial concurrence over customer programme proposals and capacity reservations within delegated limits. Commercial negotiation, technical feasibility, quality release and manufacturing scheduling remain with their responsible leaders. Material capital decisions and exceptional contractual exposures go to the CFO and investment committee. Finance should identify unsupported recovery assumptions, challenge payment structures and recommend staged commitments, but cannot certify a product or assume a customer will accept a batch. Forecasting must preserve those distinctions so management can see the commercial risk without asking analysts to make technical judgements outside their expertise.

Hyderabad is the onsite base, with scheduled Pune site reviews and occasional customer-finance travel. The leader will participate in commercial planning early enough to shape a proposal rather than reject it after the customer has received a promise. Ongoing accountability includes programme review, forecast discipline and the development of site-finance partners who can question financial consequences with operational credibility. Performance will be judged through better commitment decisions, visible cash exposures and consistent customer-programme evidence, not by attributing every favourable scientific or manufacturing outcome to the finance intervention.

What you will own

• Construct customer-programme economics that distinguish development effort, reserved capacity and repeat manufacturing, tracing payment milestones and unrecovered expenditure so a profitable unit price does not conceal a weak overall commitment.
• Establish financial concurrence for capacity reservations and dedicated investments, challenging demand certainty and recovery terms before commercial promises constrain the platform's ability to serve other customers.
• Lead programme forecasts using technical and quality assumptions supplied by accountable owners, exposing qualification delays and volume sensitivities without converting an uncertain delivery estimate into a finance guarantee.
• Recommend staged capital and customer commitments to the CFO investment committee, comparing shared and dedicated capacity with explicit cash consequences and contractual protections for changed or cancelled programmes.
• Develop the fifteen-person business-finance team across sites, coaching analysts to connect programme activity to cost and cash while maintaining constructive challenge with manufacturing, development and commercial leaders.
• Govern recurring customer-programme reviews and executive reporting, separating commercial changes from operational variance and ensuring proposed recovery actions have named owners rather than relying on unexplained margin improvement assumptions.

Candidate qualifications

• Evidence business-finance or planning responsibility in pharmaceutical CDMO, manufacturing or engineering programmes where customer commitments drive capacity and upfront expenditure. Describe a proposal you changed after testing its reservation or recovery economics. We need the financial reasoning, the operational assumptions you obtained and the decision that followed, including a case where attractive headline margins did not justify the original capacity promise.
• Bring twelve to eighteen years in finance and a Chartered Accountancy foundation, with substantial experience in operating plans, forecast challenge and programme profitability. You must reconcile programme analysis with financial records and distinguish customer-funded expenditure from platform investment. Company-secretarial or transaction exposure is helpful when it improves contractual and governance judgement, rather than being presented as a substitute for business-finance ownership.
• Demonstrate capital-appraisal methods that recognise delayed qualification, utilisation uncertainty and working-capital timing. Show how you compared alternatives without assuming a single optimistic production ramp, and how you documented the sensitivity of financial returns to technical inputs. You should be able to work with expert delivery owners while keeping financial concurrence separate from quality acceptance, scientific assessment or manufacturing scheduling.
• Show leadership across site finance and central planning with evidence of early commercial engagement. Explain how you handled a customer deadline that conflicted with the available financial evidence, what you recommended and who approved the final exposure. Strong candidates can make an uncertain decision transparent, coach teams in programme reasoning and retain a credible partnership after challenging a commercially important proposal.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-038.