Raghav Chandra

I am the chief financial officer of Meruvel Pharmaceuticals Limited, a fictional Hyderabad-based generics manufacturer listed on the NSE and BSE. We earned revenue of ₹4,860 crore in the year to March 2026: 56 per cent from generic medicines sold in the United States, 22 per cent from branded formulations in India, and the rest from emerging markets and active pharmaceutical ingredients. Four plants carry the business: an API unit at Visakhapatnam, two oral-solid units outside Hyderabad that the USFDA inspects, and a formulations unit at Baddi that serves Indian patients.

Most of what decides our results happens away from the finance office: in a quality-control laboratory, on a stockist's shelves in a district town, in a US wholesaler's annual contract round. I have spent twenty-nine years learning to follow the money back to those places. I began as an audit senior with bulk-drug clients in Hyderabad's industrial belt, costed batches on a tablet floor at this same company, built gross-to-net models for a US generics business in Ahmedabad and ran finance for a European group's Indian subsidiary in Mumbai before returning to Meruvel as CFO in July 2020.

Two years after I came back, a USFDA warning letter at one of our oral-solid plants tested every habit I had. We chose a full remediation over a faster, cheaper one, cut the dividend and ran the plant below capacity while the laboratory was rebuilt. That decision still shapes how I see the job. Finance in a generics company exists to protect the conditions under which the company is allowed to sell, and to tell the board plainly, in rupees, what that protection costs.

Current focus

I am preparing the board's decision on the second phase of our starting-material block at Visakhapatnam, a ₹330 crore question about how much supply concentration we are willing to keep. Alongside it, I am rebuilding plant budgets so that laboratory release capacity is planned as carefully as tablet-press capacity.

Conversations I welcome

I am not looking to leave Meruvel. I would consider one independent directorship at a listed company outside generics, joining the Audit Committee and, after a year of learning the business, chairing it. I can offer about thirty days a year, subject to my board's consent and a conflicts review. I also accept a few speaking invitations from finance and audit-committee audiences.