Risk-taker gets a booster dose: Meet Adar Poonawalla, CEO, Serum Institute

SII invests 90-95 per cent of its profits every year to build capacities

In May 2020, Adar Poonawalla, 40, and AstraZeneca Chief Pascal Soriot had a video-call and negotiated a deal to make a billion doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine — a deal that helped India administer 1.44 billion vaccine doses.

All told, Poonawalla’s Serum Institute of India (SII) accounted for 88 per cent of the Covid-19 jabs given in India so far, playing a significant role in the country’s economic recovery. This alone makes him Business Standard’s Newsmaker of the Year.

A Time profile on Poonawalla (who featured in the magazine’s list of 100 most influential people of 2021) read: “The