Arun Sawhney: Third dose for stability

BS PEOPLE: Arun Sawhney

‘The ability to manage end-to-end business’ — that’s how an online professional networking website sums up the key strength of Arun Sawhney, who takes over as managing director of India’s largest drugmaker Ranbaxy on August 20.

Perhaps that explains the choice of Sawhney by Ranbaxy’s majority shareholder, Japanese drug multinational Daiichi Sankyo, to lead its Indian subsidiary after two of his predecessors quit the top job without completing their contract period in less than three years.

Sawhney, who has over three decades’ experience in pharmaceuticals, has been heading Ranbaxy’s global pharmaceutical business since January this year. Before that, he headed the company’s global active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) business — the drug raw material production operations — for over two years.

A commerce graduate from Sydenham College, Mumbai, and a post-graduate diploma holder from Delhi’s International Management Institute, Sawhney spent a decade with the Indian arm of German drug major Bayer and rose up the corporate ladder before he was appointed as chief executive of Max-Gb in 1997.

Three years later, Sawhney joined Dr Reddy’s Laboratories as in charge of its global API business, similar to the responsibility in his initial Ranbaxy days.

For a company that has seen the exit of two of its chief executives since the Daiichi takeover in 2008, will Sawhney offer a stable leadership? “Yes,” says a confident Sawhney, when asked about his plans to stay at helm at Ranbaxy.

He is on a three-year contract and hopes not to follow his predecessors’ pattern which stock market analysts find “clearly unsettling”.

Arun Sawhney, the new Ranbaxy MD