During Covid-19, a wave of companies globally—from pharmaceutical giants to tech platforms like Zoom and even a fitness company like Peloton—experienced an unprecedented surge in revenue and share prices. In India, too, pharma and diagnostics firms, e-commerce, edtech, fintech and payment companies, OTT platforms, and data services firms saw a boom.
But as the world recovered, many of these pandemic-era market darlings faced a reckoning. Revenues dipped, demand normalised, and business momentum faltered.
In India, the most prominent symbol of the Covid response was the Serum Institute of India. The company became the world’s largest Covid vaccine supplier (Covishield), propelling it, and CEO Adar Poonawalla, to record revenues and global recognition.
Yet, like others, Serum too has faced a post-Covid reset, forcing it to reinvent, as Neetu Chandra Sharma writes in the cover story. The company has pivoted from crisis-mode vaccine production to long-term innovation and expansion. As Poonawalla explains, the excess manufacturing capacity has been repurposed, and the company is refocused on its pre-Covid pipeline—malaria, HPV, and other vaccines. It is also working on vaccines for mosquito-borne diseases like dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya, and hopes to roll these out in the next two to three years.
Serum is also expanding beyond India’s shores—into Europe and the US—while diversifying into financial services and even Bollywood film production as a strategic foray. With `35,000 crore in assets under management in its NBFC, Poonawalla Fincorp, the group plans a $1 billion capital raise to fuel future growth.
Elsewhere in the issue, Surabhi and Rahul Oberoi focus on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s near-bankrupt economy. Born out of a bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the country has so utterly failed as an economy that it is again dependent on International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans to remain afloat.
In the 78 years of its existence, Pakistan has been bailed out by the IMF as many as 25 times—the highest for any country. Rich Arab nations and the US have also provided aid and bankrolled Pakistan—with funds and arms that were meant to fight the USSR in Afghanistan. The USSR’s defeat at the hands of the mujahideen led to the birth of a global jihad that has singed India since 1989 and, most recently, resulted in a short but intense military confrontation that stopped short of a full-scale war.
As Ayesha Siddiqa wrote in Military Inc., her seminal 2007 book on Pakistan’s military economy, Rawalpindi runs a vast, opaque, and powerful economic empire parallel to the civilian one. It is these “jihadi generals”, who have ruled directly for nearly 33 years, and indirectly during periods of civilian government, who are responsible for the mess the country finds itself in. Nothing captures the failure of Jinnah’s ‘dream’ better than the fact that the market capitalisation of top 10 Indian listed firms’ is more than three times Pakistan’s GDP.
