Currrent - Issue

THAT HEADY FEELING
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw may be India’s richest woman but getting crowned the country’s biotech queen wasn’t a walk in the park 

By Joshua David in Bangalore

  IF Bangalore is home to India’s richest man, Wipro chairman Azim Premji, it also has the Icountry’s richest woman, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. From India’s first female brew master to being a brand ambassador for the biotech industry in India, Shaw’s story is a heady brew of success.   It was on April 7 this year that Shaw, 50, made it to the league of the seriously rich. That day her company Biocon  an  Irish   firm   she initially did business for and later bought debuted on the bourses. Investors  queued   up to  buy  Biocon
 shares like they were going out of fashion, propelling the firm’s value to well over $1 billion. 

Within hours of the IPO opening, Shaw’s personal net worth touched $428 million, and she was rubbing shoulders with the likes of Infosys founders N.R. Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani. Not bad for someone who began her company in 1978 with just $250 out of her garage (Yes, somehow all New Economy success stories kick off in a rented garage).

But getting crowned India’s biotech queen was no get-rich-quick story. Shaw found the climb an arduous one. 

In the early 1970s, a brew master who worked for India’s liquor baron Vijay Mallya sent his daughter to Australia to study what he was good at. (For those not in the loop, the job involves mixing yeast and enzymes to get that perfect head of beer). 

What is remarkable is that she was able to pursue a course meant mainly for the liquor trade despite belonging to a Brahmin family from Gujarat, which even today prohibits alcohol. 
DIFFERENCE IN DNA

Biocon sees big opportunities overseas in the next few years as drugs go off-patent, sparking demand for cheaper copycats. Indian companies, rich in low-cost research skills, are usually the first off the blocks to come up with generic versions. Biocon’s slogan is "The difference lies in our DNA." The group’s client list boasts the largest global pharma companies such as Glaxo-Wellcome, Bristol Myers Squibband AstraZeneca. Though money has never been a problem for her own endeavours, she realises that a whole new generation of biotech entrepreneurs are being held back due to lack of resources. Rivals in the insulin market include Denmark’s Novo Nordi and US-based Eli Lilly. Biocon  holds about 130 patents,   six  of   them  in  insulin

 
 
making and 20 in statins.

After her training Down Under, the young girl returned to Bangalore only to discover that most breweries back home were male fiefdoms and were not comfortable employing a woman. She had to bury her desire to become India’s first female master brewer. Frustrated, she turned to her first love — molecules. 

They say luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. At 25, when her friends were seeking safety in marriage, she had a chance referral to an Irish biotech company. She started with successfully extracting from papaya an enzyme used to tenderize meat, among other things, and from the bladders of fish a collagen that helps clarify beer. The molecules had begun to pay. 

Biocon is named after Shaw’s Irish joint venture partner, later taken over by Unilever. The Indian founders bought back the stake when the Anglo-Dutch group decided to exit in 1998 leaving the name behind for the Indian company. 

Life is strange, she says, talking about how she set up the small gig in 1978 in her rented house in Bangalore. "I had to make the most of my available resources. I used that garage for the first three years of my operations and then I moved into another rented office in town." 


Worryingly for the competition, Biocon’s strength is the ability to cut costs, keep margins flat. Shaw’s price warrior tag comes from her early days when paring costs to the bone was the only way to stay ahead of the competition. It is a ruthless form of corporate Darwinism.

Shaw can now afford an office that’s a little less Spartan. Biocon has moved into a spanking new 80-acre campus with world class facilities on Hosur Road, chock-a-bloc with IT majors such as Infosys and Digital. Perhaps fittingly, Wipro is on Sarjapura Road on the opposite side. 

Her life’s joint venture was equally serendipitous. If it was an Irish company that launched her on the road to success, the second push in her life came from Scotland, her husband John Shaw’s country. They met in Bangalore where he was posted as the head of Madura Coats. 

Her friends say she has tremendous will power. Former Karnataka government biotechnology secretary Vivek Kulkarni, who’s now the CEO of the tech firm B2K Corp, says Shaw can achieve just about anything that she sets out to do. Kulkarani says she helped him and other officials in drafting the Karnataka government’s biotechnology vision statement. 

Shaw is a people person. Whenever she can, he has lunch in the company cafeteria. Her only indulgences — if you can call them that — are her trademark scarf and pearls. And perhaps there’s a streak of egotism in her personal art collection that adorns the company’s walls. 

The biotech industry — Bangalore alone has nearly 80 companies — is a tough place to Tnavigate. But Shaw is prepared. She has a war chest of more than 70 enzymes, all in commercial production. 

Plus, worryingly for the competition, her company’s strength is the ability to cut costs, keep margins flat. The price warrior tag comes from her early days when paring costs to the bone was the only way to stay ahead of the competition. It is a ruthless form of corporate Darwinism. "The point was to think differently — to tweak available knowledge into newer applications," she says. 

Such application helped Shaw push the biotech envelope. Biocon is the first Indian company to get US FDA approval for fermentation derived molecules for pharmaceutical uses. 

She believes hers is the only company in the developing world to get the FDA green light. She believes India must embrace biotech, but with precautions. The Biocon chief’s mantra is not just more crops but better crops. She discloses that biotechnologists are working on high-protein potatoes and high-nutrient rice that could help address the country’s malnutrition problem. 

In Shaw’s quest to ratchet up  $1 billion  in  sales,  the  company  is  fast - tracking  to  more  complex  challenges. It will use in-house technology to manufacture recombinant human insulin. That will pit her head on against MNCs such as Eli Lilly, which have already started lowering their prices, apparently in anticipation. She can’t afford to take it lightly — the insulin market could be a Rs 1,000 crore battlefield. 

But it is by no means the only game in town. The focus on diabetes also includes efforts to produce oral insulin and clinical trials on diabetics. Though controversial, such clinical trials are a gold mine for India. 

It also has a large population of intermarried relatives, allowing for the study of genetic defects, as well as innumerable ethnic and tribal communities whose genomics can be studied. 

The scientist says that expertise in cell culture would also add to advanced drug discovery, making her company distinct from other Indian drug makers that rely on chemical synthesis, mostly to make medicines that go off-patent. "We are not talking about generics. We are talking new molecules," says Shaw. We’ll say success lies in her