J B Mody found out what it means to support a family at a young age. After his father died, Mody, then 17 and the eldest of six siblings, chucked up his books to sell surgical gauze and other items to provide for his family. He started out as a medical representative selling products in and around Rajkot. He then set up his own pharmaceutical distribution agency. But Mody wasn't satisfied selling products of other companies. So he moved to Mumbai and started a small pharmaceutical company in a 2,000 sq ft rented office.
Today, at 76, Mody is nowhere near retiring and wants to see his company "" J B Mody Chemicals & Pharmaceuticals, the makers of Metrogyl tablets ""enter the big league.
Though my father was a cloth merchant in Rajkot, I was not born with a silver spoon and things were never taken for granted. My father, who was ailing, stopped working for sometime before he died. I realised I needed to do something to support our family.
I got married very early. My father-in-law knew about our condition and told me about a local company called Klin Products which manufactured surgical items. They were looking for young, enthusiastic people to sell their products to chemists for a salary of Rs 115 per month, which was a lot then. So I stopped studying and took that up in 1948. I was a medical representative for two years.
It was hard work but it taught me a lot. To save money, I travelled third-class in trains and stayed in dharamshalas to avoid paying for a hotel, because we got a daily allowance of just four rupees.
I soon realised that I could branch out on my own and decided to set up my own distribution agency for the Saurashtra region. My brother-in-law invested Rs 2 lakh for the venture and I took up the agency for three pharmaceutical companies.
These included National, Chemopharma and Fairdeal. I continued on my own till 1955, when my brother joined me. Our business grew gradually, but somehow we were always just doing reasonably well.
So we came to Mumbai in 1959 and set up a pharmaceutical business. We named the company Unique Pharmaceutical Labs, which is our brand name though we are registered as J B Mody Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals. We started out in a small 2,000 sq ft rental space in central Mumbai with a team of eight people, one of whom was a chemist.
For about two years, we manufactured products for other companies on a licence basis. Then we moved on to our own products. We had about seven or eight products including some vitamin tonics and capsules. The total investment was about Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh which we reinvested from our Rajkot agency business.
The biggest challenge then was getting approvals in the licensing era. Even the government and customers had no faith in the products manufactured by Indian pharmaceutical companies. I remember how much effort it took to get the license to set up our bulk drug plant. The government was constantly questioning our competency.
Even in terms of products, there was no patent law, or rather it was abolished. So, May & Baker, a multinational company, used to manufacture a drug called Flagyl which sold at 0.75 paise a tablet. We introduced the Metrogyl tablet at 0.25 paise in 1970, and they slapped a patent infringement suit against us. It took us two years to fight that battle in the Mumbai High Court but we won.
Setting up a business like this was no easy task. But we hired the right technical people and grew slowly. There were problems along the way. Like for one year, due to union problems there was a strike in our Thane-Belapur plant.
Thankfully we had foreseen that and had already set up a plant in Ankleshwar which helped us tide over the problem. For about ten years after we began, our turnover was in the range of Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. Then we decided to go public and raise money to expand. Today we have 14 manufacturing units in four locations and over 250 products.
What has also kept us growing is the unity among the brothers and employees. I'm 76 but I still come to office at 9.15 am and know everything that's happening in the company. People ask me when I will retire and I tell them as soon as the company touches Rs 1,000 crore.
