BackThe rising son: Aalok Shanghvi
Aalok Shanghvi has shown an entrepreneurial bent, having set up solar panel maker PV Powertech along with a friend
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In an interview to Business India in 2011, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd boss Dilip Shanghvi described son Aalok as being calm and rational—qualities that should hold the 27-year-old in good stead as he works his way up the hierarchy at the company. In line with his father’s philosophy, he wasn’t catapulted into the boardroom right at the start but had to learn the business from the ground up.
Having joined the company in 2007 as product manager, the younger Shanghvi is currently senior general manager in the group’s international marketing unit. The graduate in molecular biology from the University of Michigan has also been inducted on the board of key Sun Pharma acquisition Taro Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. Taro has a sizable generic drug business in the US, Israel and a few Asian and European markets, and is a key contributor to Sun Pharma’s international revenue.
He’s like his father though— tends to be media shy. “Aalok doesn’t want to be in the media and keeps a very low profile like his father," says a Sun Pharma communications executive.
Shanghvi senior started as a small-time pharma distributor in Kolkata in the early 1980s, eventually building a global generics producer with annual sales of almost ₹ 10,000 crore, with 800 products, 23 manufacturing facilities and 14,000 employees.
He wanted to groom his son into a leader who could take the company similarly forward, according to people close to the company.
In an earlier interview, Shanghvi said: “The pharmaceutical business always involves risk as it deals with people’s lives and, at the same time, survival in the business to a very great extent is dependent on the entity’s capacity for research and innovation, which is often uncertain."
The younger Shanghvi has shown an entrepreneurial bent, having set up solar panel maker PV Powertech Pvt. Ltd along with friend Jimmy Desai.
Shanghvi is married to Karishma Mehta, grand daughter of C.K. Mehta, who founded Vadodara-based Deepak Fertilisers and Petrochemicals Corp.
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