Shot At Success

Adar Poonawalla is betting big that his family’s Serum Institute of India will be among the first to produce Covid-19 vaccines

- MANU BALACHANDRAN & NAAZNEEN KARMALI

Cyrus Poonawalla

Chairperson & managing director, Serum Institute of India

Age: 79

Rank in the Rich List

Net Worth: $11.5 billion

The Big Challenges Faced in the Last Year: Receiving requisite permissions for developing new products or getting into trials, buying the latest technology, and registering products globally

The Way Forward: Focus on building quality infrastructure, talent and skilled workforce

When the coronavirus pandemic broke out earlier this year, Adar Poonawalla, CEO of Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker by the number of doses produced and sold, weighed the options: “Do absolutely nothing and watch how it unfolds, or take the risk and become a front-runner.”

The 39-year-old chose the latter and went on a deal-making frenzy, which has put the privately held firm at the forefront of the global race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, he says in a telephone interview in late September from the company’s Pune headquarters, the latest of two interviews for this article. His father, Cyrus Poonawalla, worth $11.5 billion, founded the Serum Institute in 1966 and remains its chairman. “It’s a huge personal risk I am taking,” says Poonawalla. The firm, he says, is investing $800 million to help find, and then produce a vaccine, and has already spent $300 million of that.