More Exits From Ranbaxy Laboratories’ Top Management Team
August 20, 2014
By Jessica Wilson, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
Global HR head of the Indian multinational pharmaceutical company Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited , Sandeep Girotra, is stepping down, according to the Economic Times. In the same article, the reporter, Soma Das, states that the company’s president of global pharma business, Rajiv Gulati, also has plans to leave soon. A Ranbaxy spokesperson refused to comment on the matter.
While Reuters is also carrying the story, the site has indicated that, “Reuters has not verified this story and does not vouch for its accuracy.”
Should the news prove to be true, these exits come in the wake of the April 2014 announcement that Mumbai-based Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Limited will purchase Ranbaxy Laboratories from Japan-based Daiichi Sankyo, the majority owner of the company, for $3.2 billion.
Girotra and Gulati have been serving on the executive management team that provides “functional leadership to the company.” Their departures are only the latest in the recent management shakeup of Ranbaxy. Last month, Dale Adkisson, head of global quality and compliance, quit the company. Adkisson, a Daiichi Sankyo veteran, joined Ranbaxy in early 2010 after Daiichi Sankyo acquired a controlling share of Ranbaxy in November 2008.
According to ET, a headhunter familiar with the situation, requesting anonymity, said, “People at Ranbaxy have been anxious about their jobs, particularly because many of them earn much higher salaries than industry standards, including that of Sun.”
Managing director of Sun Pharma, Dilip Shanghvi, in a July meeting with Ranbaxy Laboratories’ executive team, assured them that he had no plans to clean house. In fact, he said, the company would need new hires to achieve the growth he foresees for the combined companies.
After the announcement of the sale of Ranbaxy, George Nakayama, CEO of Daiichi, visited India in April for a town hall meeting where he requested “talented” Ranbaxy executives not to worry about their jobs.
Daiichi is not completely abandoning Ranbaxy; it will become the second largest shareholder of Sun Pharma. When Sun Pharma and Ranbaxy are combined, the new entity, “Will [become] India’s largest drugmaker, the largest Indian drugmaker selling into the U.S. market and the fifth-largest generic company globally with combined sales of $4.2 billion.”
Shanghvi has said that his top priority is to fix the major regulatory issues besetting Ranbaxy. In January 2014, Ranbaxy’s active pharmaceutical ingredient plant in Toansa, India became the second Ranbaxy plant to receive an import alert from the U.S. in a year. Four of the company’s five FDA-approved plants have been prevented from selling to the U.S., its largest market. “The quality of business at Ranbaxy is in no way inferior to business at Sun Pharmaceutical,” Shanghvi told Reuters in April 2014. “Our focus will be to address the issue of achieving compliance. We are not looking at synergies of manufacturing; the focus is to achieve compliance.”
