Dr Yusuf Khwaja Hamied is the non-executive Chairman of Cipla Ltd, the Mumbai drug maker founded by his father, Dr Khwaja Abdul Hamied, in 1935. He is a Cambridge-trained chemist who joined the company in 1960 and ran it for decades.

When and where was Yusuf Hamied born?

He was born on 25 July 1936 in Wilno, now Vilnius in Lithuania, and was brought to Bombay as an infant. His father's family came from Aligarh and his mother, Luba Derczanska, was from Vilnius.

What is Yusuf Hamied best known for?

In February 2001 Cipla offered a three-drug AIDS treatment to Médecins Sans Frontières for US$350 a patient a year, when Western prices were US$10,000 or more. The offer helped bring down the price of HIV treatment across poorer countries.

What is Yusuf Hamied's net worth?

Forbes' real-time estimate put his wealth at about US$2.5 billion on 9 November 2026. Most of it comes from the family's shareholding in Cipla.

Where did Yusuf Hamied study?

He went to Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay and then to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1957 and a PhD in organic chemistry in 1960.

Who runs Cipla today?

Yusuf Hamied has been non-executive Chairman since 1 April 2013. Achin Gupta took over as Managing Director and Global CEO on 1 April 2026.

Cipla reported revenue of Rs 28,163 crore and net profit of Rs 3,879 crore for the financial year 2025-26. The promoter group holds about 29.2% of the company.

Yusuf Hamied: Cipla Chairman's Life Story

Key facts
Born	25 July 1936, Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania); brought to Bombay as an infant [17][18]
Family roots	Father’s family from Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh; mother’s from Vilnius; raised in Bombay (Mumbai) [17][18]
Education	Cathedral and John Connon School, Bombay; BA (1957) and PhD in organic chemistry (1960), Christ’s College, University of Cambridge [20][13][9]
Family	Son of Cipla founder Dr Khwaja Abdul Hamied and Luba Derczanska; wife Farida; no children; younger brother M. K. Hamied [18][20][30]
Company	Cipla Ltd - joined 1960, Managing Director 1976, Chairman 1989, non-executive Chairman since April 2013 [9][29]
Wealth	About US$2.5 billion, Forbes real-time estimate, 9 November 2026 [63]
Known for	Offering a three-drug AIDS treatment for US$350 a year in 2001, when Western prices were US$10,000 or more [15]

On 28 September 2000, a 64-year-old chemist from Bombay stood up at a European Commission conference in Brussels. He had been given three minutes. In front of him sat health ministers, officials and the men who ran the world’s biggest drug companies.

“Friends,” he began, “I represent the needs and aspirations of the third world.” [26]

Then Dr Yusuf Khwaja Hamied made three offers. His company, Cipla, would sell a three-drug AIDS treatment for US$800 a patient a year, and US$600 to governments that bought in bulk. It would give the technology free to any government that wanted to make the drugs itself. And it would give away, free, the medicine that stops a mother passing HIV to her baby. He ended with a line aimed at the room: “We call upon the participants of this conference to do what their conscience dictates.” [26][25]

Nobody took him up on it. “I was so disappointed, there were no takers and nobody wrote to us,” he said years later. [25]

Five months after that silence, he cut the price again, to US$350, less than a dollar a day. That offer landed on the front page of The New York Times and changed how the world treats AIDS. [15][26] It also made Hamied a hero to some and, in the words of one rival chief executive, a “pirate” to others. [26]

This is the story of how a boy born in Vilnius, raised in a nationalist household in Bombay and trained at Cambridge came to run India’s most argued-about drug company for half a century, and of what he got right and wrong along the way.

Where it began

Yusuf Hamied’s life begins with an unlikely marriage.

His father, Khwaja Abdul Hamied, was born in Aligarh on 31 October 1898. He took a BSc at Allahabad in 1920, then walked out of his master’s course to join Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation movement. He taught chemistry at the new Jamia Millia Islamia, and in the 1920s sailed for Germany with his friend Zakir Husain, later President of India. In Berlin he earned a doctorate in chemistry, working on barium compounds. [17]

On a lake cruise near Berlin in 1925 he met Luba Derczanska, a Jewish student from Wilno, the city now called Vilnius. She moved in Communist circles; he was a devout Muslim and an Indian nationalist. According to a family history by the scholars Kenneth Robbins and John McLeod, they married in Berlin’s mosque in 1928 and again the next year in the Choral Synagogue in Wilno. [18][17]

The couple settled in Bombay in the early 1930s. Abdul Hamied sold typewriters and imported tonics to make a living. Then, on 17 August 1935, he registered The Chemical, Industrial and Pharmaceutical Laboratories, with an authorised capital of Rs 6 lakh. The name was soon shortened to Cipla. It worked out of a rented bungalow on Bellasis Road in Byculla. [17][19][1]

The next summer the Hamieds went to see Luba’s parents in Wilno. Their second child, Yusuf, was born there on 25 July 1936. He was carried to Bombay about a month later. [17][18]

It was the family’s last visit. After the Nazis occupied Wilno in June 1941, Luba’s elderly parents were murdered. The same family history says the emigration papers that Abdul Hamied had been trying to arrange came through two weeks too late. Yusuf Hamied visited the killing site at Ponary, outside Vilnius, in 2008. [18]

He has described his own inheritance simply. His father, he told the Financial Times, was a Muslim who knew the Koran by heart, and his mother was Jewish. [21]

A house full of freedom fighters

The Bombay home was political. Abdul Hamied sat in the Bombay Legislative Council from 1937 to 1962 and later served as Sheriff of Bombay. Leaders of the freedom movement came and went. [17][20]

On 4 July 1939, Mahatma Gandhi visited the Cipla factory with Sardar Patel. [17] Cipla’s own annual report says the visit inspired the founder “to produce vital and life-saving medicines for India”. [1] Yusuf Hamied, who was not yet three that day, tells a sharper version passed down in the family: that Gandhi told his father the British were offering independence in return for support in the war, and that medicines would be needed. [21] The visit came two months before the war broke out, so the family account cannot be checked against the record. What is documented is what followed. War cut off imported drugs, orders poured into Cipla, and by 1941 the young company’s profits had wiped out its early losses. [17]

Yusuf went to Cathedral and John Connon School and finished his O Levels there. [20] Among his childhood friends was a boy named Zubin Mehta, who grew up to be a famous conductor. [20][18]

The first break

The break came in 1953, and it came through his father.

Alexander Todd, professor of organic chemistry at Cambridge and a future Nobel laureate, was visiting Bombay. Abdul Hamied asked him what qualifications a student needed to get in. Todd’s reply, as Yusuf Hamied has often retold it: “We have no rules, we admit anyone whom we consider suitable to be a student.” The father asked if he could send his son. “He can join in October 1954.” [24]

So an 18-year-old with only O Levels arrived at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1954 to read Natural Sciences. He took his BA in 1957 and stayed on for a PhD in organic chemistry under Todd, finishing in 1960 at the age of 23. [13][9][22]

He has never pretended it was merit alone. “If I had not met Todd, I would not have been here today; luck and fortune play a very important role in life,” he told Forbes India. [20]

The PhD who cleaned floors

He came home in 1960 expecting to start work. Indian company law had other ideas.

Because he was related to a director, the government had to approve his appointment and his pay. The approval took a long time. Accounts of exactly how long differ: one profile says a year, another about 18 months. [22][20] In his own telling to Mint Lounge, “for one-and-a-half years, I worked almost as a trainee with no salary, with a PhD degree, cleaning the floors.” When the salary finally came it was Rs 1,500. [23][22]

He used the wait. He decided, he said, to “learn the pharma industry backwards”, tablets, injections, everything on the shop floor. [23] He also set up Cipla’s chemical division to make the basic ingredients of medicines, known as bulk drugs, instead of importing them. [17]

Cipla was tiny. Sales in 1960 were Rs 48 lakh, and it did not figure among India’s top 50 drug companies. Foreign multinationals held roughly 80 to 85% of the Indian market. [20][22]

Taking on the patent law

The reason was the law. India still ran on a patent act written under British rule in 1911. A foreign company with a patent on a medicine could stop anyone in India making it, by any method, and charge what it liked.

In 1961 Hamied helped found the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association to lobby for change. “It took 11 years to achieve this objective,” he said. [22] The Patents Act of 1970, which took effect in 1972, ended patents on medicines as products. Only the process of making a drug could be patented. If an Indian chemist found a different route to the same molecule, he could sell it. [20][21]

Hamied tells a story about that fight. Cipla had made a copy of propranolol, a heart drug then sold by Britain’s ICI. He says a message went to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi asking why millions should be denied a life-saving drug “just because the patent holder doesn’t like the colour of our skin”, and that she then moved quickly. [21][75] This is his recollection; the dates of the law do not fit a week-long turnaround, and no independent record of the exchange has been published.

What is not in doubt is the result. For 33 years, until India brought back product patents in 2005 under world trade rules, Indian companies could legally copy almost any medicine. An entire industry grew in that window, from Sun Pharma under Dilip Shanghvi to Dr Reddy’s and Lupin. Cipla was there first.

His position has stayed the same for 50 years. “I am not against patents, but India cannot afford them. I am against monopolies.” [21][71]

Building the empire

On 23 June 1972, Abdul Hamied died in Tehran while visiting his daughter. He was 73. [17] Yusuf, then 35, took charge of a company with annual sales of Rs 1.66 crore. [28]

He became Managing Director in 1976 and Chairman in 1989. [9][29] By the time he gave up the managing director’s chair in 2013, sales had crossed Rs 8,000 crore. [29][30]

A chemist’s company

For four decades Cipla was run the way a laboratory is run, by one head scientist who knew every reaction. Business Standard called him a “one-man army”. [29]

The method was simple. Find an important medicine sold at a high price. Work out a new way to make it. Make the bulk drug in-house. Sell it for a fraction of the price. Repeat. By 2011 Cipla sold about 2,000 products. [31]

Two bets stand out. One was breathing. Cipla built India’s largest business in asthma inhalers, with about 45% of the anti-asthma market by 2013. [28] Hamied still lists it first. “First and foremost is our leadership in respiratory medicine,” he told shareholders in July 2025. [4]

The other was caution about going abroad. Rivals bought companies and set up sales offices in America. Hamied preferred to supply partners and let them do the selling. “If I have my own establishment abroad, you will see an increase in the top line but not in the bottom line,” he said in 2011. [31] It kept Cipla debt-light. It also meant Cipla arrived late in the United States, a point its later managers set about correcting.

The drug nobody wanted

The AIDS story began with a failure.

In the early 1990s an Indian government scientist, Dr A. V. Rama Rao, worked out a way to make AZT, then the only AIDS drug. Cipla launched it in 1993 at about US$2 a day, against roughly US$12 internationally. Almost nobody bought it. Some 200,000 capsules went unsold. [25]

Hamied went to the government. An official at the Indian Council of Medical Research told him, by his account: “We have no money for treatment. We only have money to detect and prevent.” [25]

By the late 1990s, treatment had changed. A “cocktail” of three drugs taken together could turn HIV from a death sentence into a manageable illness. But the cocktail cost US$10,000 to US$15,000 a year in the West, and the drugs were patented in most countries. In Africa, where millions were infected, hardly anyone was treated. [15][30]

In August 2000 an American activist, Bill Haddad, telephoned Hamied. That call led to the three-minute speech in Brussels, and to the silence that followed it. [26][25]

US$350

On 6 February 2001, the campaigner Jamie Love asked Hamied a blunt question: could he make the cocktail for a dollar a day? [25]

Hamied did the arithmetic and said yes. Cipla offered its combination of stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine to the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for US$350 a patient a year, and to governments for US$600. MSF pointed out that this was a discount of 96.6% on the US price of about US$10,400. [15]

The reporter Donald McNeil put the story on the front page of The New York Times on 7 February. He is said to have warned Hamied the night before: “Dr. Hamied, your life will not be the same from tomorrow.” [26] Hamied later told him, “Donald, you’ve changed my life and I don’t know whether it’s been for the good or the bad.” [25]

The offer did not, by itself, treat anyone. What it did was destroy the argument that AIDS drugs had to cost thousands of dollars. Ten weeks later, on 19 April 2001, 39 drug companies dropped their lawsuit against a South African law that allowed cheaper medicines. [16] Western makers slashed their own prices. Donors who had said treatment in Africa was unaffordable began paying for it.

Cipla then put the three drugs into a single pill taken twice a day, which made treatment far simpler in places without many doctors. [26]

The numbers moved slowly, then fast. In 2001, Hamied has said, hardly 2,000 people in all of Africa could afford treatment. [30] TIME magazine reported in September 2003 that Cipla was still supplying no more than 30,000 patients there. [32] By February 2013 he could say that more than eight million Africans were being treated with Cipla’s drug, and the cocktail cost under US$100 a year. [28][25]

Critics said he was after publicity or market share. His answer is the most quoted line of his life: “Of course I have an ulterior motive: before I die, I want to do some good.” [26]

He is clear that the episode also made the company. “The whole course of Cipla’s destiny and history changed on that day when we took the lead in AIDS drugs.” [30] Before 2000 about nine-tenths of Cipla’s sales were in India; by 2013 more than half came from abroad. [27][28]

The same play, again and again

Hamied repeated the move whenever a health scare met a high price.

When bird flu spread in 2005, Cipla made its own version of the antiviral oseltamivir, sold by Roche as Tamiflu. Hamied offered to pay Roche a 4% royalty wherever its patents were valid. [70]

In May 2012 Cipla cut the prices of three cancer drugs by up to 76%. A month’s supply of its kidney-cancer drug Soranib fell from Rs 6,990 to Rs 1,710. Hamied called it “a humanitarian approach”. [69]

His proposed rule is the same every time: let any capable company make a patented drug, and pay the inventor a royalty of around 4%. [72][71] In 2009 he went further, saying India should walk out of the World Trade Organization if its patent rules were not changed. [71]

He is also a realist about what his method cannot do. During Covid-19 Cipla took the cooperative route, selling the antiviral remdesivir under a licence from Gilead and distributing Roche’s antibody cocktail. [73][74] Asked about waiving vaccine patents, he said: “You can pick up a patent of a vaccine manufacturer, and you still won’t be able to produce it.” [27]

Handing over the lab

By 2011 Cipla had revenue of more than Rs 6,300 crore and about 40 factories. That year its long-serving joint managing director, Amar Lulla, died. [31] Hamied was 75 and still signing off on most things himself.

On 6 February 2013 he announced that he would step down as Managing Director and become non-executive Chairman from 1 April. “I can’t manage a Rs 8,000 crore company individually,” he said. Cipla hired its first outside chief executive, Subhanu Saxena. [29][30]

The professionals changed the company’s shape. Cipla bought South Africa’s Cipla Medpro for US$512 million in 2013, and the American firms InvaGen and Exelan for US$550 million in 2015, its first factories in the United States. [64][65] Saxena left in 2016. Umang Vohra, who had joined as finance chief, ran Cipla for the next decade. [58][59]

Under Vohra the company went after difficult generic drugs in America, especially inhalers. In July 2026 the US Food and Drug Administration approved Cipla’s copy of the asthma inhaler Advair Diskus, a product years in the making. [66]

Cipla today

Cipla’s revenue in the year to March 2026 was Rs 28,163 crore, its highest ever. Net profit was Rs 3,879 crore, down from Rs 5,273 crore the year before. [60][61] In the quarter to September 2026, revenue was Rs 7,404 crore and profit Rs 878 crore, a fall of 35% on a year earlier as North American sales dropped 19%. India, by contrast, had a record quarter. [62]

The company employs about 30,000 people. [4] Achin Gupta took over as Managing Director and Global CEO on 1 April 2026. [59][3]

Hamied remains non-executive Chairman. He presided over Cipla’s 90th annual general meeting on 25 June 2026, a month before his own 90th birthday, and told shareholders: “We are moving forward to our century in the year 2035.” [5]

Forbes estimated his fortune at about US$2.5 billion on 9 November 2026. [63]

The setbacks and failures

Hamied’s career has more misses in it than the legend allows.

The 1993 AZT launch flopped. Cipla was a decade early with an AIDS drug that neither patients nor the Indian government could pay for. [25]

The Brussels offer met silence. It took a second, lower price and a newspaper front page to get the world’s attention. [25]

Quality paperwork tripped the AIDS programme. In May 2004 the World Health Organization removed two Cipla AIDS medicines from its approved list. They returned six months later. The episode is covered in the next section. [8]

The biotech bet was written off. Cipla had invested in biosimilars, copies of complex biological drugs. In May 2017 it took an impairment of Rs 260 crore, said it would not manufacture biosimilars itself, and put a planned South African plant on hold. [67]

The African manufacturing dream shrank. Cipla’s Ugandan subsidiary, set up to make AIDS and malaria drugs in Africa, was listed in Kampala in 2018. In November 2023 Cipla sold its 51.18% stake for US$25 million. [68]

American regulators found serious faults. Warning letters to the Goa plant in 2020 and the Pithampur plant in 2023 delayed important launches, including generic Advair. [41][6][44]

Profit fell in 2025-26. After a record year, net profit dropped by about a quarter, and the slide continued into the September 2026 quarter as a key US product faced competition. [60][62]

There is also a cost that is harder to count. For decades Cipla depended on one man’s judgment. The move to professional management came when he was 76.

Controversies and allegations

Every matter below concerns Cipla as a company. No court, regulator or tax authority finding against Yusuf Hamied personally was found in the public record reviewed for this profile.

The “pirate” charge and Glaxo’s Ghana letter (2000-01)

Allegation: In 2000 Glaxo wrote to Cipla and its distributor in Ghana saying that imports of Duovir, Cipla’s copy of the AIDS drug Combivir, infringed Glaxo’s patents. [33][34] Glaxo’s leaders went on to describe Indian generic makers as “pirates”; the journalist Katherine Eban quotes chief executive Jean-Pierre Garnier saying they had “never done a day of research in their lives”. [35][26]

Response: Officials at the African regional patent office told reporters that the patents Glaxo cited were not valid in Ghana. [33][34] Hamied said: “We have never been against patents. We have been against monopoly.” [35] On the pirate label, he said two decades later: “Take me to court. If I’m a pirate, prosecute me.” [27]

What happened next: Cipla stopped selling Duovir in Ghana. [33] In March 2001 it applied in South Africa for compulsory licences on eight AIDS drugs. [36]

Status: Historical. No lawsuit by Glaxo against Cipla over Ghana was found. The outcome of Cipla’s South African application could not be established from the sources read.

Roche v Cipla: the cancer-drug patent

Allegation: In 2008 Roche sued Cipla in the Delhi High Court, saying Cipla’s lung-cancer drug Erlocip infringed its patent on erlotinib, sold as Tarceva. Tarceva was reported to cost Rs 4,800 a tablet and Erlocip Rs 1,600. [38]

Response: Cipla challenged the patent’s validity and argued that the public interest in an affordable cancer drug weighed against stopping its sale. The court refused Roche an interim injunction, and in 2012 a single judge held the patent valid but not infringed. [37]

What happened next:

On 27 November 2015 a two-judge bench of the Delhi High Court reversed that and held that Cipla had infringed Roche’s patent. It did not order an injunction, because the patent was due to expire in March 2016, but ordered costs of Rs 5 lakh and an account of Cipla’s sales. [37]
Cipla appealed to the Supreme Court. In 2017 the two companies settled, and on 16 June 2017 the appeals were dismissed as withdrawn. Cipla acknowledged the validity of Roche’s patent rights. The terms were not made public. [38]

Status: Closed. The 2015 finding of infringement was not overturned.

Novartis and the Onbrez injunction

Allegation: Novartis sued Cipla for infringing its Indian patent on indacaterol, a lung-disease drug sold as Onbrez, after Cipla launched a copy.

Response: Cipla had asked the government to revoke Novartis’s patents in the public interest, saying Novartis imported too little to meet demand and that its own version cost far less. It later withdrew that request. [39]

What happened next: The Delhi High Court granted a temporary injunction against Cipla on 9 January 2015. A two-judge bench upheld it on 9 March 2017, holding that a patent does not have to be manufactured in India to count as “worked” here. [39]

Status: The injunction was upheld in 2017. A final judgment in the suit was not found in the sources read.

The drug-price overcharging demands

Allegation: Since 1998 the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA) has issued demand notices saying Cipla charged more than the government-fixed price for certain medicines under the Drugs (Prices Control) Order of 1995. [2]

Response: Cipla disputes the notices. It says it has been legally advised that the demands are unlikely to stand, and it has made no provision for them in its accounts. [40][2]

What happened next:

The Bombay High Court ruled for Cipla in 2001. The Supreme Court set that aside in 2003 and sent the case back. [2]
In October 2016 the Supreme Court ruled for the government in a connected appeal. Cipla deposited about Rs 175 crore, half the amount then claimed. [40][2]
In February 2024 the Bombay High Court allowed Cipla to amend its petition on condition that it deposit half of later demands. Cipla appealed; the Supreme Court issued notice in April 2024. Cipla deposited a further Rs 27.07 crore in July 2025. [2]

Status: Pending. Cipla’s July 2026 results filing puts the amount under litigation at Rs 2,011 crore, made up of Rs 863 crore of principal and Rs 1,148 crore of interest. [2]

US FDA warning letters: Goa and Pithampur

Allegation: The US Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter for Cipla’s Goa plant in February 2020, citing failures in cleaning equipment and in procedures to prevent contamination. [41] A second letter, for the Pithampur plant near Indore, followed on 17 November 2023. It recorded about 3,000 complaints about Cipla’s albuterol asthma inhaler between April 2020 and December 2022, mostly that the inhaler did not spray or was empty. The agency wrote: “Your complaint system was ineffective.” It also cited failed sterility simulations and torn records found in scrap bags. [6]

Response: Cipla recalled six batches of the inhaler in the US in July 2023 and said no adverse events had been reported in connection with the recall. [7] It has said it will work closely with the agency and address every observation. [43]

What happened next: The Pithampur letter delayed approvals from that site, and Cipla shifted work on generic Advair towards its American factory. [44] The Goa plant was re-inspected in April 2026 and classified “Voluntary Action Indicated”, a category that does not call for regulatory action. [42] A follow-up inspection at Pithampur in August 2026 ended with seven fresh observations. [43]

Status: Open. As of 9 November 2026, no public notice that either warning letter has been formally closed was found.

WHO removes two AIDS medicines from its list (2004)

Allegation: In May 2004 the World Health Organization took two Cipla AIDS medicines, lamivudine and a lamivudine-zidovudine combination, off its list of prequalified products. The fault lay in studies run by outside contract laboratories that were meant to show the drugs behaved like the originals. It was not a finding that the medicines were unsafe. [8][45]

Response: Cipla commissioned new studies. Hamied has said in general terms that multinationals use quality questions to belittle generic companies.

What happened next: WHO restored both products on 30 November 2004 after inspecting the laboratories and reviewing the new data, saying the process showed generic makers “reacting responsibly”. [8]

Status: Closed in 2004.

Income-tax demands

Allegation: The Income Tax Department carried out a survey at Cipla on 31 January 2023. [46] In July 2024 Cipla disclosed tax demands of Rs 773.44 crore covering assessment years 2015-16 to 2022-23. [47]

Response: After the survey Cipla said it had cooperated fully and that “there is no claim or demand made on us”. Of the 2024 orders it said the demands were “not tenable in law”. [46][47]

What happened next: Cipla said it would appeal against the 2024 orders. [47] No public ruling on those appeals was found.

Status: Under appeal, by Cipla’s account. The position in 2026 could not be confirmed from the sources read.

Competition cases in India and a US antitrust suit

Allegation: In a case filed in 2012, the Competition Commission of India examined trade practices in medicine distribution involving the chemists’ association AIOCD and several drug companies, Cipla among them. Separately, in November 2022, American pension funds filed a class action alleging that Bristol Myers Squibb and a group of generic makers, with Cipla named among them, delayed cheaper versions of the cancer drug Revlimid. [48][49]

Response: No public statement by Cipla on the US suit was found.

What happened next: In June 2026 the Competition Commission closed the Indian case, finding no contravention by any party. [48] In the US, the litigation is continuing.

Status: The Indian case is closed with no finding against Cipla. The US claims are allegations that have not been tested at trial; whether Cipla remains a defendant could not be verified.

The 2023 stake-sale reports

Allegation: In July 2023 Reuters, citing Moneycontrol, reported that the Hamied family was in talks to sell its entire holding of about 33% in Cipla to private equity firms. Later reports named Blackstone and Torrent Pharma, led by Samir Mehta, among the suitors, and said talks stalled over price. [50][51]

Response: Cipla told the stock exchanges it was not aware of anything requiring disclosure. At the annual general meeting in August 2023 Hamied said: “All the news you are hearing is speculative.” [50][52]

What happened next: No sale of control took place. Family members other than Yusuf Hamied sold 2.53% in May 2024, saying the money was for specific needs “including philanthropy”, and a further 1.72% in December 2024, taking the promoter group’s holding to about 29.2%. [53][54]

Status: These were media reports, not regulatory matters. As of 9 November 2026 the family remains Cipla’s promoter and Hamied its Chairman.

Giving back

Hamied’s giving follows two loyalties: chemistry and the dying.

In 1997 he set up the Cipla Palliative Care Centre in Pune, which looks after people with advanced cancer free of charge. It has served more than 26,000 patients. The Cipla Foundation now supports palliative care projects reaching about 65,900 patients a year. [76]

The rest goes largely to Cambridge and to science teaching. He has funded a student centre, laboratories and a professorship. In December 2020, after a further gift whose size was not disclosed, the university renamed its chemistry department the Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry until 2050. [11][13] On 31 July 2026, days after turning 90, he opened two more laboratories there. “I wish I was a student again,” he said. [12][79]

In India, he gave Rs 8 crore to the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2014 to train school chemistry teachers. By September 2023 the programme had trained its 40,000th teacher. [77][14] The Royal Society, which elected him a Fellow in 2019, runs a Yusuf Hamied programme linking British and Indian researchers. [10]

He has also honoured his mother’s side. In 2015 the Yusuf and Farida Hamied Foundation helped put up a monument in Rusne, Lithuania, to Gandhi and his Lithuanian-born Jewish friend Hermann Kallenbach. [81]

India gave him the Padma Bhushan in 2005, and Cambridge an honorary doctorate in 2014. [80][9]

His giving is not on the scale of Azim Premji’s, and no published philanthropy ranking for him was found. His own summary, at 90: “that is what I’ve been doing all my life: helping education, helping in health care, and helping society in general.” [78]

Succession

Yusuf and Farida Hamied have no children. [30] Succession at Cipla has therefore meant two things: who runs it, and who owns it.

On running it, the answer since 2013 has been professionals. Three outsiders in a row have held the chief executive’s job: Subhanu Saxena, Umang Vohra and, from April 2026, Achin Gupta. [30][59]

The family’s next generation has stepped back from management. Hamied’s nephew Kamil, once described as heir apparent, left his executive role in 2015. [57] His niece Samina was executive vice-chairperson from 2016 until 31 March 2024. [58][56] His brother M. K. Hamied retired as vice-chairman in October 2024 after 47 years, citing his age, and Kamil returned to the board as a non-executive director. [55]

On ownership, the promoter group’s holding has fallen from about 33.5% in 2023 to about 29.2% after the two share sales of 2024. [53][54] The 2023 buyout talk came to nothing, but it showed that a sale is no longer unthinkable.

Hamied himself has not named a successor as Chairman. At the June 2026 meeting he said he hoped to be there for Cipla’s centenary in 2035, and added that he could not guarantee it. [5]

What their journey teaches

Know the work from the floor up. Hamied spent his first unpaid months learning to make tablets and injections. Forty years later he could cost an AIDS cocktail in his head, because he knew what every step actually cost.

A fair price can be a strategy, not only a charity. The US$350 offer did good, and it also opened export markets that made Cipla several times larger. He never claimed the two were separate.

Laws shape industries. Cipla’s rise, and that of Indian pharma, rested on the 1970 patent law that Hamied lobbied for. When the law changed in 2005, the easy years ended. Readers who follow companies can find more on how policy drives sectors in our insights.

Being right on principle does not excuse being wrong on detail. Cipla lost the Roche case, was restrained in the Novartis one and drew two FDA warning letters. Cheap medicine still has to be made to standard and within the law.

Let go before you have to. Hamied ran Cipla personally until he was 76. The company’s biggest leaps in America and South Africa came after he handed over, and he has said himself that one person cannot manage a business of that size.

A profile for general reading, based on public records and reporting as of 9 November 2026. Not investment, tax or legal advice.