Thyrocare, the world’s largest preventive healthcare lab and diagnostic centre, synonymous with quality and affordability was found by Arokiaswamy Velumani. To many’s disbelief, Velumani, a millionaire yet simpleton owns no car and lives in a small quarter above his huge lab in Navi Mumbai, India.
He was born in 1959 to a landless peasant household in a village near Coimbatore, a district in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. His father was a farmer and mother, a housewife, who took up rearing buffaloes and sold milk to sustain their family. With limited access to education in the local village, he moved out in quest for a better future. At 19, he graduated with a Bachelors in Science, but couldn’t land himself a decent job.
He ultimately found a job with a small pharmaceutical company in Coimbatore, for a meagre salary of INR 150 a month ($2 USD in today’s value). After being discontent, he left the job after a few years and decided to move to Mumbai. He landed himself with a government job as lab assistant working at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC). He decided to pursue further studies and got a PhD in Thyroid Biochemistry.
After PhD, he quit his job at BARC and started Thyrocare with an initial investment of INR 200,000, an amount he was saving for his retirement. The first Thyrocare lab was set up in South Mumbai. By then, his wife also quit her banking job and joined Thyrocare as a first employee. When started, their lab exclusively focused on detecting Thyroid disorders. Over the years, it branched out into other areas of diagnostics including diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), infertility and cardiovascular diseases. As of 2021, the company processes 3 billion investigations annually. They now have a Centralized Processing Laboratory in Navi Mumbai. The test samples come to the central lab or one of the four regional labs from 1,300 franchise collection centers across India. In addition to local presence, they now have labs in Bahrain, Bangladesh and Nepal.
As of 2021, Thyrocare is the most sought after script in the stock market. When the company got listed in 2016, it was over-subscribed 73 times. Fortune does indeed favor the bold. While he didn’t find his calling until much later, he didn’t shy away, nor did he hesitate to use up his retirement savings to fund what started off as a lab and has turned into an Empire. He was ambitious, dedicated and above all confident in his abilities and his risk certainly paid off. In mid-2021, Velumani sold his 66.1% stake in Thyrocare to API Holdings, parent company to PharmEasy for INR 4,500 crores (USD 600 million). By romancing with risk, Velumani converted his INR 200,000 investment into INR 4,500 crore (CAGR — 64%)
If you do what you have studied you will survive. But if you do what you have not studied you will be the leader.
― Arokiaswamy Velumani
Sources:
https://yourstory.com/2021/06/api-holdings-pharmeasy-thyrocare-a-velumani-create-jobs/amp
https://www.bizencyclopedia.com/article/success-story-of-arokiaswamy-velumani-founder-of-thyrocare
