Introduction
Dr. Reddy's Laboratories Ltd. founded in 1984 by Dr. K. Anji Reddy, has become India's second biggest pharmaceutical company. Reddy's manufactures and markets a wide range of pharmaceuticals in India and overseas. The company has over 190 medications, 60 active pharmaceutical ingredients for drug manufacture, diagnostic kits, critical care, and biotechnology products.
Dr. Reddy's began as a supplier to Indian drug manufacturers, but it soon started exporting to other less-regulated markets that had the advantage of not having to spend time and money on a manufacturing plant that that would gain approval from a drug licensing body such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). By the early 1990s, the expanded scale and profitability from these unregulated markets enabled the company to begin focusing on getting approval from drug regulators for their formulations and bulk drug manufacturing plants in more-developed economies. This allowed their movement into regulated markets such as the US and Europe.
By 2007, Dr. Reddy's had six FDA-plants producing active pharmaceutical ingredients in India and seven FDA-inspected and ISO 9001 (quality) and ISO 14001 (environmental management) certified plants making patient-ready medications – five of them in India and two in the UK.
In 2010, the family-controlled Dr Reddy’s denied that it was in talks to sell its generics business in India to US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, which had been suing the company for alleged patent infringement after Dr Reddy’s announced that it intended to produce a generic version of Atorvastatin, marketed by Pfizer as Lipitor, an anti-cholesterol medication. Reddy’s was already linked to UK pharmaceuticals multinational Glaxo Smithkline.
