This Pharma Company Director has Fire in the Belly to Scale New Heights "When I had joined Mankind in 2008-09, it was a much smaller company. Most of the practices were sort of family driven.

Arjun Juneja, an MBA from University of Strathclyde, UK, is a second generation business leader in the Mankind family. Presently, the Director of Mankind (Operations), he has been a prominent figure in the company's management team, along with his father RC Juneja, the Founder, and his cousin Sheetal Arora, the Managing Director.

Along with being a passionate professional, he has also been forever eager to achieve new heights and explore new business avenues. Mankind was founded in 1995 and post Arjun's joining in 2008, he has taken the company to the next level through his innovative ideas and openness towards change. His major focus areas are R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, quality assessment, IT and regulatory services. Juneja claims, "When I had joined Mankind in 2008-2009, it was a much smaller company. Most of the practices were sort of family driven, a company where promoters and top people were handling the show," says Juneja.

At that time, he had joined the business as an intern and while working on an ERP project, he received a good understanding of how the work is done at the various departments. "In pharma industry these days, the attrition rates are extremely high, but in Mankind, as compared to usual attrition rate of 20 per cent in the sector, its only 4-5 per cent," says Juneja.

Before Juneja's entry into Mankind, the company did not have a manufacturing segment. About 80-90 per cent of their products they sold in the market, were outsourced. However, post his joining, 70 per cent of the manufacturing was started in-house, leading to improvement in quality and profitability. Mankind Pharma gives equal emphasis to quality and compliance. All their manufacturing processes are adhered to GMP guidelines to ensure excellent quality standards. Juneja adds, "We have been growing fairly well at the rate of 20-25 per cent, increasing our profitability drastically from 14-15 per cent to 20-25 per cent, post my joining," says Juneja. Arjun claims, "Every industry has its own grey patches which keep coming now and then, but we strive hard to overcome those grey patches time and again."

Having launched their first R&D centre in 2012 with just 50 scientists, today they employ more than 400 scientists. At present, they are working on some new chemical entities which are primarily in field of diabetes, arthritis, etc. and have tasted success in those areas as well. Recently, under the scrutiny of Arjun, Mankind has launched another segment by the name of "PathKind", a pathology lab business, which will be launched in the month of JulyAugust and post that they even intend to launch a chain of pathology labs. Mankind Pharma has also expanded its horizon by launching its operations in the US market.

(This article was first published in the June issue of BIZ Experiences Magazine. To subscribe, click here)