Symptoms of success

Soma Das has been able to capture brilliantly the essence of Dilip Shanghvi through countless stories

Writing 500 pages of interesting stuff on somebody who is as painfully shy as Dilip Shanghvi is no mean achievement, and Soma Das deserves credit for bringing to life the remarkable story of Mr Shangvi’s journey from a tiny shop in the bylanes of Dawa Bazar in Calcutta of the seventies to create the world’s fourth largest speciality generics maker and India’s most valuable pharma company — Sun Pharma.

It is clear even from the book that Mr Shanghvi is a man of few words. After all, his only reaction after becoming the country’s richest man in 2015 was that he felt “very uncomfortable”. But in some ways perhaps, her subject’s obsession to stay away from the limelight has worked to the author’s advantage. For, virtually everything about his private life and his days of struggle is unknown.

In that sense, Ms Das was lucky, as she managed to spend some time with the man who also gave her access to friends and company colleagues to an extent that he had never before done. Add meticulous research to that. The Reluctant Billionaire is an assimilation of over 150 interviews of employees, former employees, relatives and friends.

The author has been able to capture brilliantly the essence of the man through countless stories, which sets the book apart from many other biographies. Consider this story that demonstrates Mr Shanghvi’s business acumen. The senior management of Sun once received an email from the CMD asking them to report a list of products which they had never discussed with doctors, did no promotions the whole year, didn’t print a single piece of literature about, and which needed to be phased out. The message, the senior management thought, was clear: The big boss wanted to prune the product basket.

At the meeting, Mr Shanghvi turned over all the pages of the reports that all divisions had submitted, and asked: “So these are the products you wanted to phase out. How much is the turnover of our company?” Someone answered, “Rs 9,000 crore”.

“Sales from all these products (that were on the culling wish list) add up to Rs 1,600 crore, that is 16 per cent of our revenue and all that comes without spending a single penny on their marketing and promotion. One way to look at it is that these products sustain your salaries and daily expense of the company.” After one of his signature pauses before his stunned audience, Mr Shanghvi asked them to knock on the doors of doctors to tell them these products still exist.

There are examples galore of such interesting anecdotes. For example, the bulk of Mr Shanghvi’s big thought discussions took place not in some swanky boardroom, but in a nondescript office in Ville Parle, away from the main office so as not to be disturbed and distracted. On those special days, early in the morning, his executive assistant would pile up medical journals and books containing a list of medicinal drugs with their effects and directions for use. There, the two of them, sitting across the table, pored over every page, discussed the merits and demerits of every product they came across in the therapy verticals Sun was present in or was planning to enter, topping the experience with idlis ordered from Ram Krishna Restaurant for lunch.

It was actually what Mr Shanghvi calls a cafeteria approach. His philosophy was that if a Sun representative goes to a cardiologist, his offering must include whatever the doctor prescribes. He wanted Sun’s menu card to be complete for each category of therapy specialists it was working with. That meant not leaving out even minor drugs with inconsequential market sizes.

In the US, however, the “cafeteria” approach was dumped, as Mr Shanghvi was canny enough to realise that the strategy wouldn’t work in a mature healthcare market. So Sun moved to a portfolio approach, which meant it had to have an attractive basket of complex generics to entice the wholesalers who controlled nearly 75 per cent of the US generic market. He, however, didn’t change his old habit of cherry-picking distressed assets and extracting value rather than making big bang moves.

It is to the author’s credit that the acquisition of TDPL, Caraco, Taro and Ranbaxy read like thrillers, and readers would secretly wish that Mr Shanghvi and his team came out as winners, which they did finally.

However, one of the biggest shortcomings of the book is its fleeting reference to the concerns over Sun’s corporate governance following a whistle blower’s complaint. The author casually says, after the narrative was wrapped up in 2017, Mr Shanghvi ’s life saw many ups and downs. As a matter of fact, it was more downs than ups, and the book seems to have found a convenient excuse to maintain a studied silence on it. That’s a blemish for an otherwise excellent book.

Nevertheless, if there is one lesson readers would take from the book, it’s this: Success in any field comes after much struggle, hard work, heartbreaks, and sacrifice. And you don’t have to have it in your genes to become one of India’s richest.

The Reluctant Billionaire

Soma Das

Penguin Random House India

500 pages; Rs 799