While others played safe, Shanghvi bet on complex generics and specialty pharma, and rode a wave of acquisitions to make Sun Pharma a global force. Now, as stakes rise, he is placing bigger and bolder bets
In his 42-year journey of building Sun Pharma from the ground up, there is only one thing Dilip Shanghvi would do differently.
“Sometimes I would have got angry… That I wouldn’t have wanted to do. Other than that, nothing,” says the 69-year-old chairman and managing director of Sun Pharma, India’s largest pharmaceutical company.
The root of this regret goes almost as far back as the origin story of the company. Shanghvi’s father, who was into pharma trading, would tell him: “You don’t need to shout to be heard. When you get angry, you lose control over yourself, and I think then you are giving control to the other person.
It was his father who gave a young Shanghvi $200 to start Sun Pharma in 1983 to make psychiatric drugs: The small first step of a giant leap that sees Shanghvi ranked 79th in Forbes’s 2025 list of world’s billionaires. Interestingly, as the market volatility played out in April across the globe, Shanghvi’s wealth rose from $24.9 billion on April 1 to $27.4 billion on April 17—the day this story was finalised—raising his global rank among billionaires to 65th.
However, Shanghvi did not rely on things such as a fluctuating stock market to build his company. What he did was place bold bets on research, targeting complex generics and specialty drugs, and a series of successful acquisitions to make Sun Pharma a global pharmaceutical powerhouse with a turnover of ₹49,851 crore in 2023-24 (FY24).
