Cyrus and Adar Poonwalla, India’s Vaccine Giants

Stud farms to sturdy vaccines, the story of Pune’s Poonawallas, the owners of Serum Institute and manufactures of the Oxford vaccine in India…

Transcript

00:00At the cost of huge profits that we have sacrificed for keeping the prices very affordable and

00:19the lowest in the world.

00:20They are not the biggest in terms of revenue because for almost all of their products they

00:25use a very high volume, low price approach.

00:29And yet they do that with very high quality.

00:39India being a socialist country, I decided to get away from it and do something with

00:43the masses.

00:45And this suggestion was given to us by one of the doctors, that why don't we go in for

00:50life-saving drugs.

00:51That's how Serum Institute was born and conceived.

00:59The challenges were red tape and delay for permissions from all the government agencies.

01:12And the major breakthrough came when we got pre-qualified for supplying vaccines to UN

01:19agencies.

01:29The company has grown and succeeded in taking on big challenges and so Serum actually ships

01:49far more vaccines to the world than it ships in India.

01:53It's a big supplier to India as well.

01:56Africa gets a very high percentage of its vaccines from Serum.

02:56We were amazed with what he already knew.

03:10He was also very impressed, of course, to answer your question on the new facilities

03:14that we've built in record time.

03:16In fact, we've added a third facility also that we showed him so that we can handle more

03:22than a billion doses a year.