Dilip Shanghvi

He is married to Vibha, and the couple has two children: Aalok and Vidhi.

Dilip Shanghvi was born on 1 October 1955 in Amreli, a small town in Gujarat, India, to Shantilal N. Shanghvi and his wife Kumud. His father was a wholesale drug distributor.

He completed his schooling from J. J. Ajmera High School following which he graduated from Bhawanipur Education Society College. He then proceeded to earn a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Calcutta.

After completing his education he started helping his father in his wholesale generic drugs business in Kolkata as a drugs distributor. It was during this time that the idea of starting his own drugs manufacturing company came to him.

He borrowed Rs. 10,000 from his father and established Sun Pharmaceutical Industries in Vapi, Gujarat, in 1982. The business was started with a two-man marketing team and a small manufacturing facility where only five psychiatry products were produced.

Shanghvi and his team worked hard to grow the business a little at a time, and by the early 1990s the company had opened its own research and manufacturing facilities. New product lines in the fields of cardiology and gastroenterology had also been added.

By the early 1990s the company had also begun exporting to neighboring countries. In 1994, the company went public.

Under Shanghvi’s leadership the company continued to grow at a fast rate. An astute businessman, he adopted an extensive acquisition strategy to expand the company. In 1996, he bought a drug manufacturing plant of Knoll Pharma in Ahmednagar, Maharashtra—his first acquisition. By this time he was also able to expand the company’s reach to 24 countries.

Dilip Shanghvi is the founder of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited, an Indian multinational pharmaceutical company which is the largest chronic prescription company in India. It is also the largest Indian pharma company in the US and the fifth largest specialty generic company globally.