Book review
It took a sleeping pill a get a somnolent company up and running. The drug was Calmpose—Ranbaxy’s answer to Roche’s Valium—and its launch in 1969 was the hitherto unknown company’s first step on the long road to global stardom.

India accounts for a tiny fraction of the world pharmaceuticals market—just 1.2 per cent. To become really big, Ranbaxy realized early in life, it had to go global. But success doesn’t come easy in the world market which is dominated by players like Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. With each of these putting billions of dollars into research every year, it takes a great deal of courage and wisdom to venture into their territory—markets like the United States and Europe.

The Ranbaxy Story sets down, for the first time, Ranbaxy’s remarkable journey from a distributor of medicine to a multinational corporation, deriving over eighty per cent of its business from outside India.

It is also the story of the Singh family, of Bhai Mohan Singh’s dogged pursuit to expand the company during the licence-permit-quota raj and of Dr Parvinder Singh who was convinced way back in the 1970s that Ranbaxy’s destiny lay in the international markets.

Bhupesh Bhandari, a business journalist who has followed the company closely for over a decade, traces Ranbaxy’s growth against the backdrop of the global pharmaceutical business. What ensues is a riveting account of human ambition and corporate strategies in this intimate portrayal of one company’s rise to success.

About the author The Ranbaxy Story is Bhupesh Bhandari’s first book, though readers of business news will be familiar with his byline in Businessworld and Business Standard. Yet to face a dull moment in life, he reads about The Great Game on Sundays and often dreams of going back one day to the mountains from where he hails.