A Mega-Thread on the story of an Indian billionaire scientist: Murali Devi of DivisLabs
1) Murali Divi belongs from Machilipatnam, a small town in Andhra Pradesh.
2) He comes from a very humble family background. His father ran the family of 14 on a narrow allowance of just ₹10,000 per month.
3) After completing his doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences from Andhra's Kakatiya University, he spent a few years in the US.
4) Divi failed his intermediate exams (the equivalent of higher secondary) twice due to weak English.
5) However, instead of giving up, Divi doubled down and grabbed the opportunity to go to the US as a pharmacist instead of becoming a chemist like his elder brothers.
6) When Divi left India for the states in 1976, he was 25 years old with just $7 in his hands.
7) From there, he went on to draw a salary of $65,000 a year at US companies like Trinity Chemical and Fike Chemical.
8) He would soon come back to India with his wife and children with $40,000 and no plans.
9) In 1984 he teamed up with Kallam Anji Reddy to build Cheminor, which later in the year 2000 got merged with Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
10)To turn it around, Reddy and Murali Divi took over Cheminor, an ailing contract manufacturing company.
11)The idea was generated for Cheminor to be the contract manufacturing arm of Dr. Reddy, while Dr. Reddy’s concentrated on generics and drug discovery.
12)But reviving Cheminor was an improbable order. The company possessed only a few chemical reactors.
13)The equipment present was used to produce APIs, which were churning outdated products.
14)Divi took charge and stepped in as a managing director, hired a fresh crew of graduates, and trained them in the chemistry skills required to revive the firm.
15)His team included chemists who worked on developing a cost-effective manufacturing process for the API, ibuprofen.
16)A year later, the team had set up a production line which was soon scaled up to 1,200 metric tonnes catering to 25 % of the global demand for the compound.
17) On an ordinary day, Murali Divi would show up at 7:30 in the morning at his office in Hyderabad, work continuously till lunch, and then spend the entire day at the manufacturing plant to monitor the production line.
18)He would sometimes remain at the plant till midnight, ironing out kinks in the production process and hand holding his employees through any problems.
19)When he resigned Cheminor in 1990, almost 125 people resigned the same day. That tells you how well he handled people.
20)Six years later, Divi founded Divi’s Laboratories, his own pharma company. Headquartered in Hyderabad, the company makes active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) and intermediates as APIs are the critical inputs for making a drug.
21)The initial plan was to focus on customizing and manufacturing small quantities of a drug for clinical trials and laboratory experiments by big pharma companies. But international pharma giants were suspicious of outsourcing to India.
22)Naproxen is an ingredient that is popularly known as an anti-inflammatory drug. It was a crowded market, and Divis was the 22nd firm to enter it behind giants such as Swiss health care company Roche and chemical and biotech firm Lonza Group.
23)But Murali Divi had made some headway in developing an efficient process to manufacture the compound and saw an opportunity there.
24)This was a time when the industry still depended on traditional chemistry methods to produce drugs.
25) These methods were simple but inefficient because they used chemicals as catalysts, increasing costs and leading to pollution.
26) He turned to newer technologies that used enzymes instead of chemicals as catalysts and devised an efficient production process for Naproxen.
27)Today, Divis Laboratories is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of Naproxen.
28)Over time they have snatched market share to manufacture APIs such as Dextromethorphan (cough suppressant) from Lonza, pharmaceutical arm of Dutch material and life science company DSM.
29)Since the pandemic, Murali Divi has seen his wealth more than twofold to ~ $10 billion now.
30)One of the secrets of Divi’s rise to be the second-biggest drug maker in the country is its ability to scale up capacity and cut costs using advanced technology.
31)Divi’s Labs has a strong relationship with big pharma companies, including six out of the top ten innovators, Merck, Pfizer, and GlaxoSmithKline.
32)From nowhere in 1990, Divi’s Labs is now one of the top three API manufacturers in the world.
