Before Achin Gupta set foot inside Cipla’s plush headquarters in Mumbai, India, as the CEO of its One India business in 2021, the company sent a book to his home. It arrived during the strange, suspended days of the Covid pandemic, and he read it cover to cover. It was the story of the company – decades of battles fought in the name of medicine, access, and a particular, stubborn strain of idealism rooted in India’s independence struggle.

“Growing up in India, everybody knows Cipla,” he says. “But I think when you read through how many of those decisions were made, what were the considerations, how it shaped the landscape – it’s very inspiring.” He pauses. “That was one of the big magnets which pulled me to Cipla.”

Now, on 1 April 2026, that magnet has drawn him all the way to the top. Gupta – IIT Delhi trained biochemical engineer, IIM Ahmedabad MBA, two of India’s premier universities ˗ the two-decade veteran of global pharma became managing director and global CEO of Cipla Ltd, one of the world’s largest generic and most storied pharmaceutical companies. And as he speaks to Pharmacy Business, he sits beneath a Cipla logo that reads, simply: ‘Caring for Life’.

The weight of that phrase is not lost on him.

A privilege, not a burden

Ask Gupta how his first six weeks in the role have felt and the word he reaches for first – before strategy, before metrics, before anything – is privilege.

“It’s a privilege to lead this organisation,” he says. “And as you can make out from the logo behind me, we’re completing 90 years. So it’s an honour.”

“Very exciting, a bit challenging, but yes – really looking forward to this,” he adds.

The challenge is real enough. Cipla is a 30,000-strong global operation with a presence in more than 70 countries, complex supply chains navigating active geopolitical disruption, and a UK and European business that has grown at 25 per cent compound annually over the past two years. The incoming CEO inherits not just a corporation but a legend – a company that, at the turn of the millennium, broke open the global HIV crisis by selling antiretroviral drugs for a dollar a day, slashing them from the $15,000-per-year brand price.

Dr Yusuf HamiedGetty Images

The documentary Fire in the Blood told that story to the world. The founding Hamied family’s patriarch, Dr Yusuf Hamied, remains an inspiration and guiding conscience for the organisation even today.

Far from finding that legacy weighing heavily, Gupta finds it energising. “The entire organisation – 30,000 colleagues – shares the same purpose and helps drive this every day,” he says. “In many ways we’re extending the solid foundation that we’ve already built, as opposed to trying to turn a corner into something different.”

That foundation is not simply corporate heritage. It is a decision-making framework. “It percolates down in all the decisions that we take,” he explains. “Where we decide to play. Which therapies we develop. High-quality medicines, but accessible to all.”

From generics giant to innovation pioneer

Stand back and look at what Cipla is actually doing and the scale of ambition becomes clear. This is not a company content to simply replenish the world’s generic medicine cabinet and call it done. Under Gupta’s watch – first as CEO of the India business, then as Global COO, and now at the helm – Cipla has been quietly, methodically climbing the value chain.

Take the headline that landed earlier this year: Cipla, through its African subsidiary Medpro Pharmaceutica, has entered a licensing agreement with ImmunoACT to commercialise an indigenously developed CAR-T cell therapy, India’s first, across South Africa, Algeria, and Morocco.

CAR-T therapy, for those unfamiliar, is cutting-edge immunotherapy: a patient’s own blood cells are extracted, genetically reprogrammed to recognise and destroy cancer cells, and reinfused – a significant step forward in the treatment of certain blood cancers.

“You don’t need to do everything by yourself,” Gupta says of the partnership model underpinning these forays. “There has to be a lot of sharing and partnering to bring the best technology and the best skill sets from either side.” Stem cell work, similarly, proceeds through joint ventures. In India, Cipla has launched an inhaled insulin, developed in partnership with an American firm. “I think that’s quite a breakthrough,” Gupta says, with characteristic understatement.

The company’s breath actuated device, he argues, significantly improves patient adherence. It is the kind of patient-centred engineering that Gupta clearly relishes: not innovation for its own sake, but innovation as a delivery mechanism for access.
Further up the pipeline, GLP-1 peptides – the class currently reshaping global health discussions around weight management and diabetes – are firmly in Cipla’s sights.

“As these products start going off-patent, the market will expand,” Gupta says. “We’ve already launched in the first-generation GLP-1s in the UK and we would be working on future loss-of-exclusivity products as well.”

Europe: The fourth home market

Gupta is disarmingly direct about the company’s ambitions in the UK and Europe. “India, the US and South Africa are the big markets for us; amongst all of the rest, the UK is now probably the fourth largest,” he says. “It’s growing very rapidly for us.” Cipla’s European headquarters are in the UK.

Today, Cipla holds around 50 registered products in the UK. “If you go out five years, we would try to double this number,” Gupta says. “There’s a serious commitment from the organisation to keep building our front end and building our offering in the UK and in Europe and do that on the back of more complex products, because that’s where a need gap exists.”

In revenue terms, whilst he declines to publish specific figures – “these are not numbers that we report, nor do others” – he reveals that UK and Europe combined already represent “close to $100 million” and the ambition is to scale that “three to four hundred” over the next five years. In other words, tripling or quadrupling in the next five years.

The growth lever is complexity. Cipla is not, Gupta insists, interested in piling into the commodity end of the generics market. “Where there are multiple players who can service the market” is not where Cipla wants to compete. Instead: respiratory (already a strong portfolio), complex injectables, peptides including GLP1s, biosimilars and a handful of rare disease medicines.

Cipla is also transitioning its metered-dose inhalers to lower-carbon-footprint propellants – a move that responds directly to NHS and European sustainability targets, and which Gupta believes will position Cipla “amongst the leaders in the space.”

The volatility problem

When asked about the volatility of medicine supply in the UK, the conversation becomes somewhat uncomfortable but in the most useful way. Gupta has spent years working the UK market. He knows its mechanics intimately. And he does not shy away from describing what is, in effect, a structural dysfunction.

“The volatility that we see sometimes on the retail side is something that we want to guard against,” he says.

The race to the bottom driven by price comparison platforms has pushed some generic products below the cost of their own packaging. Manufacturers walk away. Shortages follow.

“If it falls below the sustenance level, it is an issue,” Gupta says. “We try to be as open as possible with the customers that we deal with and try to give advanced indications a product is nearing a point where it’s not sustainable.”

On the question of government intervention, he is measured – but pointed. “Branded generics,” he argues, deserve different treatment. These are products where, for patient safety reasons, you need to identify which product it is – and so they become branded generics that fall into an in-between space, neither pure generic nor innovative branded medicine.

“That’s one area which could be considered,” he says, gesturing at the VPAG (voluntary scheme for branded medicines pricing, access and growth) system. “It would help relieve some pressureon those complex products where there are fewer manufacturers who made large investments, put up the infrastructure to supply – and then having to compromise on your margins puts extra pressure on the supply.”

It is a cri de coeur that will resonate with many community pharmacists, who have seen their dispensing budgets stretched beyond tolerance whilst the supply of certain medicines has grown unreliable. What Gupta is saying, in essence, is that the economics of complexity deserve recognition – and that the system’s current bluntness risks penalising precisely the suppliers it most needs to retain.

Community pharmacy

Community pharmacy in the UK – a sector that has long endured funding issues and is now, tentatively, beginning to see recognition of its role – is clearly a subject close to Gupta’s heart.

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