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Synopsis It took a sleeping pill to get a somnolent company up and running. The drug was Calmpose—Ranbaxy’s answer to Roche’s Valium—and its launch in 1969 was the hitherto unknown company’s first step on the long road to global stardom. To become really big, Ranbaxy realized early in life, it had to go global. But success doesn’t come easy in the world market which is dominated by players like Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. With each of these putting billions of dollars into research every year, it takes a great deal of courage and wisdom to venture into their territory—markets like the United States and Europe. The Ranbaxy Story sets down, for the first time, Ranbaxy’s remarkable journey from a distributor of medicine to a multinational corporation, deriving over eighty per cent of its business from outside India. It is also the story of the Singh family, of Bhai Mohan Singh’s dogged pursuit to expand the company during the licence-permit-quota raj and of Dr Parvinder Singh who was convinced way back in the 1970s that Ranbaxy’s destiny lay in the international markets. Bhupesh Bhandari, a business journalist who has followed the company closely for over a decade, traces Ranbaxy’s growth against the backdrop of the global pharmaceutical business. An intimate portrait of this pioneering company, The Ranbaxy Story is a must-read at a time when going global is high on the agenda of most Indian companies.