No Shot In The Dark

Adar Poonawalla is betting big on a Covid-19 vaccine, and preparing for the next possible pandemic

- MANU BALACHANDRAN

Adar Poonawalla has much to thank god for, especially during these trying times. Of course, the 39-year-old runs the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer and is heir to the fortunes of his billionaire father, Cyrus Poonawalla, the 165th richest man in the world with personal wealth in excess of $10.9 billion, according to Forbes. Yet, it is a decision to walk away from selling a stake in his company, the Serum Institute of India, sometime in 2015 that he is grateful for.

Five years ago, the privately-owned maker of vaccines was contemplating a 10 percent stake sale to private equity (PE) firms and sovereign funds at a staggering valuation of ₹80,000 crore. The deal would have been India’s largest PE investment, and came close on the heels of merger talks with homegrown pharmaceutical giant Cipla.

“We had looked at a stake sale because people said, you’ve got so much value in your company, why don’t you unlock a little bit of that and use it to acquire technologies or other companies,” says Poonawalla. “But some of the larger acquisitions we were looking for, worth between $1 billion and $2 billion, didn’t go through. We then said forget it. Thank god for that.”

Not selling the stake to a PE fund, which would have eventually forced the Poonawallas to go public, is now proving to be a blessing amid the Covid-19 pandemic, when Poonawalla is betting against all odds on an unproven vaccine that could potentially stem the spread of the coronavirus. The vaccine, ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, being developed by the Jenner Institute at the University of Oxford, is a frontrunner among about a hundred others that are being developed around the world.