admin Truly passionate about the pharmaceutical industry, Janak Sheth, CEO & Managing Director of Century Pharmaceuticals Ltd transforming patients’ lives through safe medication. An IIT Chemical Engineer with 4 years of international work experience in a pharmaceutical company, Janak introduced Century Pharmaceuticals Ltd in 1982, an active pharmaceuticals ingredient manufacturing company (APIs). Initially, the company was expanding products manufactured and later in exports to 60+ countries worldwide.
Revolutionary Targeted Therapy Approach for Cancer and Asthma
The company has significantly contributed towards finding solutions to chronic problems like Cancer and Asthma etc. Century Pharmaceuticals’ expert team have engaged themselves in the pioneering research of a novel molecule for the treatment and cure for Asthma with a futuristic targeted therapy using recombinant proteins. They are also engaged in the development of a personalised medicine for cancer patients using a targeted therapy approach which promises a treatment without any side effects.
The Greatest Accomplishment
Immediately after college, Janak joined Sarabhai Chemicals. He was given the task of technical support Engineer to resolve issues in the plant and design a multistage distillation column. Janak could solve a few of the chronic problems in the plant. He also designed independently a multistage distillation system and which was implemented by the company without a verification. As a result, he was soon transferred to their international division as a Project Engineer to plan a new pharmaceutical project in Indonesia. After the initial planning, he used his skills to design, purchase, install and later start production in Indonesia. This gave him an end to end experience of setting up a new plant. He left them confident enough to start and run his own industry successfully.
Project that Forced him to be Innovative and Creative
With minimum equipment to manufacture APIs, they started expanding their sales and increase their plant capacity. “The easiest thing was to add more equipment. However, I believe as an MSME we must not consider ourselves as a small scale industry but we should find ways to innovate and achieve our objectives with the minimum capital employed,” expressed Janak. With a minor additional capital cost they doubled the throughput of their ETP plant.
I believe with a Chemical engineering background and a good knack of finance I could maintain a consistent success record over the last 40 years with growth and profitability in the company
Greatest Inspiration
Janak’s greatest inspiration is Dhirubhai Ambani — with limited education and starting from the bottom of the society he could achieve a miracle in his life span. “I always had a great desire to be able to contribute to the national economy by generating taxes and duties while doing business. Also, I get a great sense of happiness as we are directly able to feed more than 500 people through employment at our factory considering each employee having a 5 member family.”
Top Skills to Become a Successful CEO
“As a successful CEO we need to have sufficient knowledge of Finance, be abreast of technological advances taking place in the world, marketing etc. He needs to be a people’s person, a good communicator and be easily accessible to receive constructive criticism from employees,” Janak Assured.
We believe it is our duty to contribute towards the society who have helped us grow so far
‘Be Careful Whom to Trust’
While asking Janak about what he learnt from mistakes, he said, “In 2007 the company entered into a partnership with an Israeli Biotech company. It was an opportunity to take Century to great heights. GVFL, armed with a Biotech research fund, approached us through their CEO and convinced us to use the fund for the innovative research project with an assurance to pay them back only if successful. We trusted the company and their CEO. The legal documents prepared were different than their confirmation to us. However, the CEO assured us not to be worried about those standard clauses. After a few years, the project did not result into success but the venture fund ruthlessly strangulated us and forced us to cough up huge sums of money going by the letter and spirit of the agreement in spite of the fact that we lost a huge amount of money in the project. We made a blunder in selecting a partner who did not invest further to mature the technology but mislead us as they were only interested in their personal gains while inflicting losses on us. It was a big learning lesson for us to be far more careful whom to trust and how to execute legal contracts. The good part was that we fought hard to negate the challenges faced and are now doing exceedingly well.”
Our Slogan – ‘Customers Run Our Business’
“We ensure that each customer is taken seriously and we try to maintain any commitment made to the customer for quality, delivery or price etc. We have a long term approach and do not worry about short term losses in case we have to satisfy a customer. As a result, we have not lost any customer who has bought our product. In fact, we have several customers whom we have been able to retain over 30 years!” said Janak.
Covid-19 Pandemic Impact
Covid affects Century Pharmaceuticals as all business activity came to a standstill. However, they had several export orders to be executed before the lockdown. “We were one of the first companies to start exporting our products. This fact was appreciated by our customers and they rewarded us handsomely with bulk repeat orders. In fact we have done exceedingly well this year when many of our competitors are struggling,” evinced Janak.
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