On February 6, 2001, the phone rang past midnight. New York Times reporter Donald McNeil was calling Cipla chairman Yusuf Hamied in Mumbai to confirm news, almost unimaginable at that time.
Cipla was offering a three-drug AIDS cocktail at $350 a year to Médecins Sans Frontières. This could potentially pull down the then-going rate globally of about $12,000 by over 97%.
“Doctor,” McNeil told him, “your life will not be the same after tomorrow.”
He was right. The next morning, the story ran on the paper’s front page and sent shockwaves through the global pharma circles. They had been exposed. Or rather, challenged morally for not making a much-needed life-saving drug available to the masses across the world at a price that was affordable.
Within weeks, 39 multinational drug companies suing South Africa’s government over the cheaper generic AIDS drugs dropped their case and waived their patents. Within a few years, the cost of first-line AIDS treatment fell below just 1 US dollar a day.
All triggered by a man driven not by greed, but by a sheer desire to democratise the availability of a life-saving drug.
This moment was not an overnight outcome but rather an outcome of the struggle that began decades earlier.
It won’t surprise us if you have not heard about this very private person – Yusuf Hamied. But there is a fair chance you have heard about the company he ran – Cipla.
Ancestry and wartime origins: The early making of Cipla
Hamied’s father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, traced his lineage to the Mughal courts and to a 15th-century Sufi saint from Uzbekistan. In 1921, he walked out of Allahabad University to join Gandhi’s boycott of British institutions, and went on to become the co-founder of Jamia Millia Islamia. His mother, Luba Derczanska, was born in Wilno, then part of Russian Poland, and was Jewish. An aristocratic Muslim scientist marrying a Jewish woman from Lithuania was not a common pairing in the 1930s.
Khwaja Abdul Hamied founded Cipla on August 17, 1935. Yusuf was born the following year, in Vilnius. He was three years old when Gandhi personally called his father and asked Cipla to start manufacturing wartime medicines after supplies from Europe dried up. The company complied, producing everything from calcium pills to an anti-malarial tablet for Indian troops fighting on the eastern front.
From Cambridge PhD to challenging multinationals
In 1953, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, then Sheriff of Bombay, brought his 16-year-old son along to meet a visiting Cambridge chemistry professor, Alexander Todd. Todd was impressed after a short conversation and told the elder Hamied that Yusuf could join Cambridge the following year. He would not need any other qualification.
Yusuf skipped his A-Levels entirely and enrolled at Christ’s College at 18. He graduated in 1957, the same year Todd won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yusuf stayed on to complete his PhD under him. In 1960, at 24, he returned to Bombay to join the family firm, determined to break the hold multinational companies had over India’s drug market.
Yusuf Hamied joins Cipla
Hamied joined Cipla in 1961 as an R&D officer, starting on a salary of Rs 1,500 a month. However, he didn’t even see that first paycheck for a full year because it took a full twelve months for the government to approve official permission for him to work there, an aftermath of a leftover colonial-era rule that required government approval for anyone related to a director of a public limited company to join that company, Hamied explained in an interview with Harvard Business School.
At that time, multinationals had a stranglehold on 70-80% of India’s drug market. Import duties were as high as 146%, and the country was still following British patent law from 1911 that protected finished drugs, not just the process of making them.
Frustrated, Yusuf Hamied helped found the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association that same year to lobby for patent reform. It would take another decade for that pressure to produce results.
Why the 1972 Patents Act unlocked India’s generic pharma boom
In 1971, Cipla launched a generic version of propranolol, the world’s first beta-blocker. A beta-blocker is a type of medication that is used to reduce the stress on your heart and blood vessels. Cipla was promptly sued by its British inventor, ICI. Yusuf Hamied sent an emissary to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with a blunt question: should millions of Indians be denied a life-saving drug because its inventor did not like the colour of their skin?
As a result of this, India passed the Patents Act in September 1972. Under the new law, companies were only allowed to patent the process used in making the drug and not the end product. Furthermore, the patent would only last for seven years. This reshaped the Indian pharmaceutical industry by letting local companies legally copy any drug as long as they found a different way to manufacture it.
Hamied became Managing Director of Cipla in 1976. He calls the period from 1972 to around 1986 the industry’s ‘golden age’. Unable to enforce product patents, many multinationals abandoned India, and local firms such as Cipla, Ranbaxy and Cadila expanded their operations to fill the vacuum. This led to the companies building a domestic API manufacturing base that Hamied still considers the industry’s backbone. An API is the actual chemical component within a specific medication that produces the desired effect or cure.
“The real strength of Cipla has always been our people,” he told Financial Express Online. “We have grown into a global organisation with over 30,000 members who all share Cipla’s strong purpose of Caring for Life.”
That golden age had a shelf life. Through the late 1980s, the world was quietly folding intellectual property into global trade rules, and by 1989, when Hamied became Cipla’s chairman, India had signed on.
The $350 breakthrough: Saving 10 million lives in Africa
Cipla’s first attempt at an AIDS drug, in 1993, went nowhere. It launched AZT capsules at $2 a day, which was still too expensive for most Indian patients. The company shut the line down within the year.
Hamied kept following AIDS research anyway, and by 2000, with roughly 8,000 people dying of the disease every day in Africa, Cipla had secured the ingredients for a full three-drug cocktail.
That September, he was given three minutes to speak at a closed-door European Commission meeting, over objections that a non-European should not be allowed to. He used it to promise an $800-a-year AIDS cocktail, free technology transfer to any developing country that wanted it, and a free drug to stop mother-to-child HIV transmission. Nobody responded.
Five months later came the dollar-a-day breakthrough with MSF, and the front-page New York Times story that followed. “With the pioneering effort that Cipla put into HIV AIDS from 2000 till about 2007-2008, we must have saved at least 10 million lives in Africa alone,” Hamied said. “That gives me tremendous satisfaction,” he added.
Cipro, bird flu, and a decade of running patent fights
The offers kept coming from Hamied. After the 2001 anthrax scare in the US, Hamied offered to supply the antibiotic Cipro at 10 cents a tablet, a quote Washington used to negotiate Bayer’s price down instead of granting Cipla the business. A few years later, Cipla’s scientists cut Roche’s 20-step, two-year synthesis of the flu drug Tamiflu down to twelve steps, and had a version ready to sell by October 2005, only for the Indian government to restrict its retail sale.
That same year, Parliament passed a new patent law that Hamied publicly called, in a television interview, the setting in motion of “a genocide” in Indian healthcare. Oddly, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan months later.
From $350 to $85: Scaled impact and corporate succession
By the mid-2010s, Cipla was a $2-billion-a-year company selling in 183 countries. Hamied had begun signing licensing deals with some of the same multinationals he had once fought in court, including Gilead and Merck. He stepped back from day-to-day management in 2013 after 52 years as Managing Director, staying on as Non-Executive Chairman. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society in 2019.
Hamied’s philanthropy has run mostly through science and education. A donation from him led Cambridge to rename its chemistry department the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry, under an arrangement running until 2050, and to establish the Hamied Scholars Programme. Closer to home, he and the Cipla Foundation gave Rs 20 crore to build a chemistry facility at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune.
Cipla itself has kept reaching for the same playbook under his watch. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it cut the price of its generic version of Remdesivir, originally developed by Gilead, from Rs 4,000 to Rs 3,000. In the years since the 2001 breakthrough, the price of first-line generic AIDS treatment kept falling, from Cipla’s original $350-a-year offer to roughly $85 within two decades, with India eventually producing around 92% of the world’s HIV drug supply by volume.
Succession has moved in fits and starts since. His niece, Samina Hamied, once seen as a likely future leader, stepped down as Executive Vice-Chairman in March 2024. His brother Mustafa stepped down as Vice-Chairman that September, when a nephew, Kamil, joined the board instead.
As of 2025, Hamied’s own net worth was estimated at $5.25 billion, according to Forbes.
Cipla: Where the company stands today
The company commands a market cap of Rs 1.14 lakh crore. Over the last 5 years, the company has seen its revenues and profits grow at a CAGR of 8% and 10%, respectively. Revenues for FY26 stood at over Rs 28,000 cr, while profits came in at a little over Rs 3,800 cr.
US Market Target: The $1 billion exit strategy
Much of Cipla’s FY27 story now hinges on five products it’s counting on to break open the U.S. market: generic Ventolin, three respiratory launches (including a generic Advair), and one large peptide molecule. As per the investor call of Q1FY27, the company wants to push North America from its current $162-million quarterly pace to a $1-billion annual exit rate by year-end.
‘If You’re Saving Lives, It’s Not Just a Business’
Hamied turned 90 on July 25 this year, and told Eastern Eye that he intended to keep doing what he has always been doing: providing affordable medicines to people who need them. He was spotted at Lord’s soon after, watching an England-India ODI.
“Imagination is one of the qualities that differentiate people. There is, however, one quality more important. And that is enthusiasm. Even today, I’m still very enthusiastic about introducing new products and something different,” Hamied said.
Asked what still drives him, his answer was simple. “If I can contribute to R&D, to the portfolio and to the pipeline, to exporting more, these are the things that interest me. If you’re saving lives, it is not just a business,” he said.
That line sums up the motto driving this nanogenarian leader. When asked to sum up 65 years at Cipla, he said, “The success of a company cannot be judged by financial performance alone. What truly matters is the quality of the journey and the contribution made to society.” As Cipla heads toward its own centenary in 2035, it is a measure Hamied has never really updated, only kept testing against the numbers.
Editorial Note: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Yusuf Hamied and Cipla. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.