Dilip Shanghvi, born on 1 October 1955, is the founder of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries and one of India’s richest businessmen. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 2016, and India Today ranked him eighth in its 2017 list of India’s most powerful people. According to Forbes, as of May 2025 he was the fifth richest person in India, with an estimated net worth of $28.9 billion. He was the EY Entrepreneur of the Year in India in 2005.
He was born into a Jain family from Gujarat and raised in Kolkata, where his father ran a small wholesale business trading generic medicines. He studied at J. J. Ajmera High School and earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Calcutta. In his early years, he helped his father manage the family’s pharmaceutical trading business, which gave him first-hand knowledge of the industry and led him to want to manufacture medicines instead of selling other companies’ products.
In 1983 he founded Sun Pharmaceutical Industries with a small loan from his father, concentrating at first on psychiatric drugs. The company began with a single manufacturing facility in Vapi, Gujarat. By 1993 profits had grown enough for him to invest in dedicated research and development facilities, and Sun Pharma steadily widened its range of products and markets over the next decade.
Acquisitions became the company’s signature strategy. The largest was the $4 billion purchase of Ranbaxy Laboratories in 2014, which made Sun Pharma India’s largest pharmaceutical company and one of the leading generic drugmakers in the world. Regulatory problems and a fall in profits between 2014 and 2018 tested the group, but Shanghvi steered it through the recovery. By 2023 Sun Pharma reported profits above Rs 8,000 crore, with growth in its specialty medicines business, and in the financial year 2026 the net profit was reported at Rs 11,479 crore on revenues of Rs 58,220 crore, according to Wikipedia.
He has also led overseas deals, including the 2023 acquisition of the US firm Concert Pharmaceuticals, to extend the company’s reach in specialty drugs. In January 2018 the government appointed him to the Reserve Bank of India’s 21-member central board. He is chairman of the board of governors at IIT Bombay and, since 2017, a trustee of the Rhodes Scholarship programme at Oxford.
Shanghvi follows the Jain faith. Some descriptions call him a Vaishnav because of his visits to the Shrinathji temple in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, but by birth he is a Jain and visits both Hindu and Jain temples. His surname is associated with Jainism and comes from a term meaning the leader of a Jain community. He is married to Vibha Shanghvi, and their son Aalok and daughter Vidhi both work at Sun Pharma.
Despite his wealth, he is known for keeping a low public profile. The only biography of him, The Reluctant Billionaire by the journalist Soma Das, was published by Penguin Random House in 2019 and was nominated for the Tata Literature Award in the best business book category. Business Standard called it “an excellent read”. His career, from a Kolkata generics wholesaler’s family to the head of India’s largest drugmaker, is one of the clearest examples of the industry’s growth.
Featured image: The main building of IIT Bombay (file photo; Dilip Shanghvi is chairman of the institute’s board of governors, and this is not a photo of him). Photo by Shishirdasika, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
