“I have never let gender get in my way. It has taken me over 30 years to get from a garage to the huge campus we have today and it has been a long journey.”
Kiran Mazundar Shaw, an Indian billionaire businessman, is the President and Managing Director of Biocon Ltd, a biotech company based in Bangalore, India. She is the president, CEO, entrepreneur, businesswoman, scientist and founder of Biocon Ltd, Asia’s leading biopharmaceutical company and current President of the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. She has received several prestigious awards including Padmashri, Padma Bhushan, Economic Times Women Entrepreneurs of the Year, Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for Pioneer Award in Life Sciences and Healthcare and Technology. Under his leadership, his company has evolved as a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company encompassing a well-balanced business portfolio of products and services with a research focus on autoimmune diseases. Fierce Biotech ranked her among the ’25 Most Influential People in the World in Biopharmaceuticals’. Named among the 100 Most Influential People in the World by Times Magazine, she is the second Indian (after Azim Premji) to join the Giving Pledge Global initiative created by Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates that encourages billionaires to give the most. part of his wealth to philanthropic organizations. Causes. It has established the 1,400-bed Mazundar Shaw Cancer Center in Bangalore to provide affordable world-class cancer care services to patients regardless of financial or social status. In 2004, she became the richest woman in India.
The daughter of an India-based United Breweries brewmaster, Kiran wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps and therefore went to Federation University (formerly Ballarat University) in Australia to study malting and brewing and Earning the title of brewmaster in 1975, which was a very untraditional field for women. In 1974, she was the only woman in the brewing course and headed her class. After returning to India, he found that no company is willing to offer a beer brewing job because ‘it’s a man’s job’, but he started working at Biocon Biochemical’s Ltd I Ireland and the same year he founded his own company called Biocon in India I collaboration with Biocon Biochemical’s Ltd, with a capital investment of Rs 10,000 / – in the garage of their rented house in Bengaluru. He faced incredible challenges due to lack of funds for his business. Banks turned down her loan because biotech was a totally new field at the time and she was an entrepreneurial woman. In addition to this, he found that in India it is difficult to find employees who work for a woman or find investors despite knowing their experience and dedication. In fact, some vendors even refused to do business with her unless she hired a male manager. But self-assured Kiran was never discouraged and within a year Biocon had become the first Indian company to export enzymes to the US and Europe, and never looked back.