Founded in 1781 as a traditional medicine shop in Osaka, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited is older than the United States of America. It is the oldest pharmaceutical company in the world still operating,a $30.6 billion global biopharma that transformed itself through the largest foreign acquisition in Japanese corporate history.
The year was 1781. In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress was ratifying the Articles of Confederation. In Osaka, a man named Chobei Takeda I opened a shop selling traditional Japanese and Chinese medicines. There was no particular reason to believe that one of these events would prove more durable than the other. Yet the Articles of Confederation lasted eight years. Takeda is still here.
That is the fact that defines this company before any revenue figure or pipeline asset: Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited has been in continuous operation for 243 years. It is the oldest pharmaceutical company in the world. Not the oldest Japanese pharmaceutical company. The oldest, full stop. Merck was founded in 1668 as a pharmacy, but its pharmaceutical manufacturing operations came later. Takeda has been selling medicines since the reign of Emperor Go-Momozono.
By FY2024, ending March 2025, Takeda reported revenue of $30.6 billion, employed 50,000 people across approximately 80 countries, and invested $4.9 billion in research and development. Growth and Launch Products accounted for 48 per cent of core revenue. These are numbers that place Takeda in the global top ten. But the company that generated them bears almost no resemblance to the Osaka medicine shop of 1781, or even to the mid-size Japanese pharmaceutical company of 2017. What happened in between was a single, enormous bet.
In January 2019, Takeda completed the acquisition of Shire plc for $62 billion. It was the largest foreign acquisition ever made by a Japanese company. It was also, by a considerable margin, the most consequential decision in Takeda’s 238-year history. The deal was not universally popular. Founding-family descendants and long-term Japanese shareholders questioned whether a company with $17 billion in revenue should take on the debt required to absorb one nearly its own size. The leverage was significant. The cultural integration of a Dublin-headquartered, Boston-operated rare-disease company into a Osaka-rooted Japanese institution was, to put it conservatively, uncertain.
What Shire gave Takeda was transformation. Before the acquisition, Takeda was a mid-size Japanese pharmaceutical company with a strong domestic position, a credible oncology portfolio, and a GI franchise built around Entyvio. After the acquisition, Takeda was a global top-ten biopharma with leadership positions in rare disease, plasma-derived therapies, neuroscience, GI, and oncology. The company went from 30,000 employees to 50,000. Revenue jumped from $17 billion to $29.4 billion in the first full post-merger fiscal year. The geographic center of gravity shifted from Tokyo to a genuinely global footprint spanning 80 countries.
Shire’s plasma-derived therapy business gave Takeda immunoglobulin products and albumin,biological medicines derived from human plasma that cannot be replicated by small-molecule chemistry or standard biologics manufacturing. The rare disease portfolio brought treatments for hereditary angioedema, Hunter syndrome, and Fabry disease, conditions affecting small patient populations but commanding premium pricing. Vyvanse, Shire’s blockbuster ADHD treatment, added a neuroscience franchise that Takeda had not previously possessed. The question was whether the combined entity could service the debt, integrate the operations, and retain the talent. By FY2022, with revenue at $30.3 billion and 3.5 per cent constant-exchange-rate growth, the arithmetic suggested it could.
Takeda’s India patent portfolio tells a particular story. The company has filed 412 patent applications at the Indian Patent Office between 1996 and 2025. Of these, 52 have been granted. That grant rate,roughly one in eight,reflects both the rigour of the Indian patent examination process and the nature of the molecules Takeda has sought to protect: biologics, novel formulations, and combination therapies that face heightened scrutiny under Section 3(d) of the Indian Patents Act.
The filings that matter most for India’s public health landscape may be those related to TAK-003, Takeda’s dengue vaccine. Dengue is not a disease that preoccupies boardrooms in Boston or Zurich. It is a disease that fills hospital wards in Chennai, Mumbai, and Kolkata every monsoon season. India accounts for a substantial share of global dengue burden, and the development of a safe, effective vaccine has been a public health priority for decades. TAK-003 is a live attenuated tetravalent dengue vaccine that demonstrated efficacy across all four dengue serotypes in the pivotal TIDES trial. Its relevance to tropical India is not theoretical. It is epidemiological.
The broader patent portfolio spans Takeda’s core therapeutic areas: GI, oncology, rare disease, and neuroscience. Entyvio,vedolizumab, the gut-selective biologic for inflammatory bowel disease,has multiple patent filings in India covering formulations, dosing regimens, and manufacturing processes. Ninlaro (ixazomib), an oral proteasome inhibitor for multiple myeloma, and Adcetris (brentuximab vedotin), an antibody-drug conjugate for Hodgkin lymphoma, round out the oncology filings. Each granted patent represents a molecule that Takeda has committed to making available in the Indian market, subject to regulatory approval and pricing negotiations that can take years.
The company that Chobei Takeda I founded sold camphor, saffron, and musk. The company that Christophe Weber runs sells vedolizumab, immunoglobulins, and brentuximab vedotin. Between those two product lists lies the entire arc of modern pharmaceutical science, and Takeda has been present for most of it. The transformation from traditional Japanese pharma to global diversified biopharma did not happen in a single moment. It happened in stages, each one discarding a previous identity.
The first transformation was industrialization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Takeda moved from trading in natural medicines to manufacturing synthetic pharmaceuticals, building factories and research laboratories that made it Japan’s leading domestic drugmaker. The second transformation was internationalization, beginning in the 1960s and accelerating through the 1990s and 2000s, as Takeda established operations across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. But these were incremental expansions of a fundamentally Japanese company.
The third transformation was the Shire acquisition, and it was not incremental. It was a discontinuity. In FY2020, the first full year after integration, Takeda reported $21.5 billion in revenue. By FY2021, that figure was $29.4 billion,50,000 employees, 7.4 per cent underlying revenue growth, operations in 80 countries. The company’s therapeutic focus narrowed to five core areas: gastrointestinal, rare disease, plasma-derived therapies, oncology, and neuroscience. Everything else was divested or deprioritised. By FY2023, Takeda was spending $4.8 billion annually on R&D and managing approximately 25 new molecular entity clinical-stage assets. By FY2024, R&D investment reached $4.9 billion, and Growth and Launch Products had risen to 48 per cent of core revenue.
The arithmetic of this transformation is visible in five years of revenue data. FY2020: $21.5 billion. FY2021: $29.4 billion. FY2022: $30.3 billion. FY2023: $28.2 billion. FY2024: $30.6 billion. The dip in FY2023 reflected generic erosion on certain legacy products and currency headwinds, not structural decline. The recovery to $30.6 billion in FY2024 confirmed that the growth engine,Entyvio, immunoglobulins, the rare disease franchise, and the launch products,was generating enough momentum to offset the predictable attrition of older assets. Takeda’s 25-plus manufacturing sites across the globe produce the biologics, plasma fractions, and small molecules that sustain this portfolio. The company that once sold camphor from a single shop in Osaka now operates a supply chain that spans continents.
Sources: Takeda Annual Reports FY2020 through FY2024 (fiscal years ending March 2021 through March 2025). Indian Patent Office (patent filing data, 1996–2025). OPPI member directory.