“If tomorrow the Chinese decide not to supply the world with raw materi...” — Yusuf Hamied Quote

If tomorrow the Chinese decide not to supply the world with raw materials, the pharma industry would collapse.

Cipla has a strong professional management team, and we take team decisions. My brother has been working at Cipla since 1973.

India made a big mistake by signing up to TRIPS. With a population of 1.3 billion, India can't afford a monopoly in healthcare. Monopolies lead to higher prices and we can't allow them in a country like India with so much poverty and misery. It was like signing our own death warrant.

AIDS today is not a death sentence. It can be treated as a chronic illness, or a chronic disease.

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

Chinese... companies do not have to think about whether they do something to enhance their competitive edge in international markets.

There were only two other Chinese families in this town of 25,000, but to our parents, the determining factor was the quality of the public school system.

I wanted to do something far from my intellectual and physical home, so I went to live in Beijing for eight months and took Mandarin Chinese.