Early pangs: When Ajanta Pharma MD realised that he was in the wrong place

Nothing beats the joy of recollecting the early days of the business. For Ajanta Pharma MD Yogesh Agrawal it was something similar, as he recalled an incident, soon after he had joined the business, during a recent interaction with ETPanache.

“When I joined the company, we had a 3,000 square feet research & development facility and one HPLC (High-Performance Liquid Chromatography; a technique in analytical chemistry used to detect the raw ingredients used in products). I was very proud of this,” Agrawal said. He managed to get an appointment with a much larger company in US, almost 25 years back.

“I went to his office, we got talking, and I proudly told him that we have one HPLC. He called his R&D head to speak with me. She responded, they may have 130 or 140 HPLCs. I immediately knew I was in the wrong place. The CEO straight away asked if our family was ready to sell the company,” he said with a laugh.