Lupin's Deshbandhu Gupta: Playing catch up

Over the last eight months, Lupin's 65-year-old Chairman Deshbandhu Gupta has hired seven senior professionals above the rank of vice president, besides Kamal K. Sharma, the new MD, to whom Gupta intends to hand over the day-to-day running of the company. It's a much needed clean-up-cum-revving-up of Lupin, long known only for its anti-kochs treatment (AKT or anti-TB) drug and more recently as one of Ketan Parekh's favourite 10, or K-10. Gupta's end goal: Turn the Rs 1,120-crore Lupin into a pharma powerhouse like Ranbaxy and Dr. Reddy's Labs. In fact, he's even put a number to his goal: $1 billion (Rs 4,600 crore) by 2008.

Much of that will be the responsibility of Sharma, who's been poached from RPG Enterprises, where he was President and CEO of Life Sciences and Speciality Group. But Sharma is no stranger to Lupin. Between 1978 and 1995, he worked with Gupta in various capacities. "I want to prepare Lupin for tomorrow," says Sharma. As a first step, he is focusing on the fundamentals of the company's business. More of molecular research (like Dr. Reddy's Labs) and a greater concentration on the US generics market (like Ranbaxy). In the last few months, Lupin has received US FDA approval for three generic drugs (or ANDAs) including cefuroxime axetil, and 12 bulk drugs. By 2004, Sharma wants to file 10 ANDAs for approval in the US every year.

Gupta is helping by fixing Lupin's financials. He has sold 25 per cent of his holdings in the company to CVC International and New Bridge Capital to bring in Rs 250 crore that will go towards repaying debts owed by promoter companies. "Lupin should become debt free in another three years," says Indrajit Banerjee, President (Finance), Lupin. By then, it also plans to strengthen its drug discovery pipeline, launch OTC products, and enter newer exports markets like Brazil and Mexico. Now all that Sharma has to do is to turn the plans into action.

-Swati Prasad

Hello, India
Ericsson's budding leaders get a taste of India.

Team Ericsson: In search of the right formula

If you want to sell to a customer, you got to know her first. It's the oldest lesson in the savvy marketer's book, except that none of the cookie-cutter MNCs took that very seriously-until recently. Breaking the mould, among a handful such, is Ericsson. Last month, its Director (Executive Development), Steven Newman, an American who lives in Paris, was in India along with a class of 26 "students", meeting customers, shopping, watching technology in action...generally getting a hang of India. "The next generation of Ericsson executives should know where the next billion customers will come from," said Newman by way of explanation.

At least in the mobile telecommunications market, India is turning out to be one of the most sophisticated, but price sensitive markets. So, Ericsson reckons that if it can get the formula right here, it can do business anywhere else in the world. The 26 students were, then, actually Ericsson executives from all over the world (Croatia, Argentina, Brazil, Sweden, the UK...) who have been chosen for corporate positions in the future. Their job is to take the learnings from India and transmit it to their teams back home.

A subset of Newman's team went to IIT Madras to meet Professor Ashok Jhunjhunwala's telecom research team and also to the villages of Madurai where N-Logue, one of Jhunjhunwala's companies, is implementing a wireless infrastructure. Looks like the first world was travelling in India's hinterland to see what the future would look like.

-Vidya Viswanathan

LAWSUIT
Oh, Not Again!

Phaneesh Murthy: Encore

It seems to be open season on Infosys and its former-star-turned-bete-noire Phaneesh Murthy. More than a year after Murthy quit Infosys in the wake of sexual harassment charges brought against him by his former secretary in the US, Reka Maximovich, he and his former employer have once again been hit with charges of sexual harassment. This time, it's from Jennifer Griffith, a former administration official at Infosys' Fremont, California, office that Murthy used to head. Murthy calls Griffith's accusations "complete b... s..t and a blatant case of gold digging". He has also avowed to fight the charges "even if it means dipping into my retirement funds". When BT went to press Infosys said that the lawsuit had not been served on it, and that it will not have a "material effect" on its financials. And Sunil Wadhwani, Chairman of iGate Global Solutions, where Murthy is the CEO, said that he believed the allegations to be "without foundation" and that the board had complete faith in Murthy.

-Venkatesha Babu

64-bit Chip
Should you fall for it?

A few weeks ago, apple unveiled its spanking new G5 computer sporting an all-new 64-bit processor, and late September AMD followed suit by bringing to market the world's first 64-bit pc processor. Since the new chip has double the processing power of today's processors, should the geeks of the world rejoice? Yes and no.

There are few applications today that can take advantage of the new prodigious processor. One reason why the big daddy of computing, Intel, has no immediate plans of rolling out 64-bit processors off its fabs. But there is a small universe of speed-hungry users who'll kill for a faster processor. In their food chain, fanatical gamers come right on top. Sure, these guys have had 128-bit processing game consoles for more than four years now, and it does make financial sense to hook up your Rs 15-k Playstation 2 to your Rs 30-k 29-inch TV than splurge Rs 75-k on a top-of-the-line gaming machine. But if you are a sucker for graphic-heavy games or artificial intelligence-intensive games like SimCity 4, the 64-bit chip is for you.

On rung two of this food chain come media folk, designers, film makers and their ilk. Their computer of choice is Apple, which sports a power pc chip, optimised for graphics applications. The advantage of such processors: The 64-bit chip incorporates memory onto its dye, allowing the memory to run at the same speed as the processor. That means you can now run entire databases on ram, making life much faster. Like it or not, 64-bit is the new paradigm.

-Shailesh Dobhal

ROW
Pyrrhic Victory

Capitol Hill: Beginning to close the dooors on talent

So the champion of free trade is erecting barriers now that the game is beginning to hurt it? In July this year, the US slashed the number of H1 B visas from 195,000 last year to 65,000, and L1 visas, which allow intra-company transfers, seem to be the next on the chopping block.

The move will hurt not just Indian companies, but those in Europe and Canada as well. Worse off will be the smaller tech companies that do not have adequate H1 B staffers. But is the US shooting itself in the foot, too? After all, it is the import of technology workers that helped fuel its economy's bull run beginning the early 90s. And this time around, a shortage of skilled workers may make it harder to accelerate any imminent revival. Besides, such a restriction would encourage American corporations to offshore instead of merely outsourcing within the US. Says Kiran Karnik, President, Nasscom: "Ultimately, the economies of scale will prevail." Worse, the US may also lose some domain specialists, should Indian companies decide to hire them in India. The bottomline: To stay the world's best economy, the US will willy-nilly have to keep its doors open to the world's best brains.

-T.R. Vivek