Biocon’s brand of insulin competes directly in the world market with big pharmas like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. In the last fiscal year ending March 2004, the company’s total income increased 94 percent to Rs. 5,493 million (about $125 million). The profit more than tripled from Rs. 358 million (about $8.1 million) in 2003 to Rs. 1246 million (about $28.5 million) in 2004.
Thanks to the success of Biocon, Ms. Mazumdar-Shaw is possibly India’s richest woman; her 40 percent stake in Biocon’s $1.2-billion net worth puts her at about $480 million.
But it wasn’t easy getting to this point. She struggled with the difficulties of being a woman in a predominantly male industry, and because biotech was still under the radar in India, raising money was tough. But she hung on, and by the late 1980s, Biocon had turned a profit. The Irish company sold its stake to Unilever, who in turned sold it to England’s Imperial Chemical Industries. Ms. Mazumdar-Shaw persuaded her husband, John Shaw, to buy out ICI’s share. He now serves as Biocon’s vice chairman in charge of international business development, and owns 25 percent of the company.
Having engineered the success of Biocon, Ms. Mazumdar-Shaw now wants to raise the bar for the industry in general. She is chairman of the Vision Group on Biotechnology, an organization set up by the state of Karnataka to advise and direct the government in formulating policies, initiatives, and business incentives for the biotech sector.
She was also instrumental in setting up the Institute of Bioinformatics and Applied Biotechnology (IBAB) in Bangalore, which educates young people in the practical aspects of working in the biotech industry. “Until academic institutions start doing serious work in biotechnology, the private sector will have to fill in,” she says.
With foreign companies now looking to India to perform clinical trials and other research needs, Ms. Mazumdar-Shaw knows the industry has plenty of room to grow. “The industry is now worth $1 billion, and by 2010 it will be worth $5 billion,” she says. She also sees the Indian biotech industry growing from 25,000 employees to a million by that time.
What concerns her, however, is the lack of funding for small biotech startups in the country. Ms. Mazumdar-Shaw says that some very good Indian companies don’t receive enough funding because investors don’t consider them “sexy” enough. Those that do often can’t operate freely because investors make unreasonable demands on them.
“Smaller companies can’t really stand up to investors,” she says. But with the size and stature of Biocon, she can now dictate her own terms. “Whenever investors in the industry try to offer me advice, I tell them, ‘you missed the boat once, and you’ll miss it again.’” Hopefully this time they’re listening.