Y. K. Hamied and Family

Cipla offered HIV/AIDS treatment at $1 a day in 2001. That single decision changed the company's international reputation more than any business strategy could.

Cipla was founded in 1935 by Khwaja Abdul Hamied with an explicitly nationalist purpose: to manufacture medicines in India rather than importing them from abroad. Yusuf Khwaja Hamied, who led Cipla for several decades, made the decision in 2001 to offer a combination antiretroviral treatment for HIV/AIDS at $1 per day, a fraction of the price that originator pharmaceutical companies were charging, to governments and NGOs working in sub-Saharan Africa. The intervention made treatment accessible to hundreds of thousands of patients who would otherwise have been unable to afford it.

The company today is a significant global generics manufacturer with a particularly strong position in respiratory drugs, where it has invested in device development alongside the formulations themselves. Cipla's commercial model and its public health commitments have not always pulled in the same direction, and managing the tension between profitability and access has defined how successive generations of the Hamied family have thought about the business. The current leadership includes Umang Vohra as CEO, with Samina and Rumana Hamied active in philanthropic and governance roles.