In February 2001, Yusuf Hamied stood before an AIDS conference in Durban and offered to supply a triple-drug antiretroviral cocktail for $350 a year. The same treatment cost $12,000 in the West. The offer changed global health policy. It also revealed the character of the company his father had founded sixty-six years earlier in a Bombay laboratory.
Dr. Khwaja Abdul Hamied founded Cipla in 1935 — the same year the Indian National Congress demanded self-reliance in essential industries. Hamied, who had earned his doctorate in chemistry from Berlin, believed that a country of three hundred million people should not depend on foreign laboratories for its medicines. The name he chose, the Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories, was a statement of intent: this would be a company that manufactured, not merely imported.
In its first decades, Cipla supplied the Indian market with drugs that would otherwise have been unavailable or unaffordable — vitamins, anti-malarials, analgesics. After independence, when the Indian Patents Act of 1970 abolished product patents for pharmaceuticals and allowed process patents only, Cipla was among the first companies to develop its own manufacturing processes for drugs still under patent elsewhere. The company grew steadily, unglamorously, from a single factory on Bombay’s western suburbs to a national presence.
Then Yusuf took over. Dr. K.A. Hamied’s son had been running Cipla since the 1970s, but it was the AIDS crisis that made him — and his company — impossible to ignore.
By 2001, the HIV/AIDS pandemic had killed twenty million people, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Antiretroviral drugs existed but cost $10,000–$12,000 per patient per year — more than most African countries spent per capita on all healthcare combined. The economics were simple and brutal: the drugs worked, but the people who needed them could not pay.
Yusuf Hamied had been quietly developing generic versions of the key antiretrovirals — stavudine, lamivudine, nevirapine — and had combined them into a single fixed-dose tablet. At the Durban conference, he offered to supply the combination at $350 per patient per year to governments in Africa. To Médecins Sans Frontières, he offered it at $1 a day. Newspapers around the world carried the headline. The pharmaceutical industry called it piracy; the WHO called it a turning point.
Within two years, Cipla’s offer had forced a global reckoning. PEPFAR, the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was launched in 2003 with $15 billion to buy antiretrovirals for Africa — including generics. The Global Fund followed. Today, twenty-eight million people in low- and middle-income countries receive antiretroviral treatment. Cipla did not invent the drugs. It made them affordable, and in doing so, it demonstrated something that the Indian pharmaceutical industry has been proving ever since: that quality and affordability are not contradictions.
If the AIDS offer defined Cipla’s conscience, inhalers defined its science. Manufacturing a metered-dose inhaler or a dry-powder inhaler is not the same as pressing a tablet — it requires mastery of aerosol physics, device engineering, and particle-size control. Most generic companies avoid it. Cipla leaned in.
The company developed its own inhaler platform, producing devices for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease that met stringent regulatory standards at a fraction of the originator price. In India, Cipla’s respiratory franchise — led by Foracort, Duolin, and Budecort — made it the market leader in a category that directly affects hundreds of millions of people. The company produces over 1,500 products across therapeutic areas, but it is the inhalers that demonstrate the depth of its manufacturing capability.
By FY25, Cipla’s North American business had reached an all-time high of $934 million in annual revenue, driven in part by complex respiratory products and differentiated generics. In South Africa, it ranks as the third-largest company in the private pharmaceutical market — a position that traces directly back to the antiretroviral work of two decades earlier.
Cipla operates across more than eighty countries, with India contributing 42% of FY25 revenue and North America reaching its highest-ever annual revenue. In South Africa, it is the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the private market. The company’s One India strategy — combining branded prescription, trade generics, and consumer health — crossed the 11,000-crore mark in FY25, and the global branded prescription portfolio now generates over $1 billion annually.
Cipla operates forty-six manufacturing facilities producing over 1,500 products. Of these, seven plants in India carry US FDA registration — spanning Bengaluru, Indore, Pune, Raigad, and Goa — with capabilities covering API synthesis, formulation, and complex inhaler device manufacturing. In the United States, Cipla operates through its subsidiary InvaGen Pharmaceuticals, acquired in 2016, which gave the company direct-to-market capability in the world’s largest pharmaceutical market.
Sources: Cipla Annual Reports FY2015–16 through FY2024–25. US FDA facility registration data. Indian patent office records.