KACHARAGADLA

When C.C. Paarthipan, a first-gen pharma entrepreneur, listed his tiny Chennai company, Caplin Point Labs–with revenues of less than $1 million–it was oversubscribed 117 times. He raised about $900,000 in the 1994 IPO and deployed it in a formulations plant in Pondicherry. But in just a few years the company got mired in quality-control issues; consignments were rejected, and it became a penny stock. “I couldn’t pay my sons’ school fees–my company had become a non performing asset,” recalls Paarthipan, 62. “That’s when I took the risk of going to places where most people fear to go.” He packed his bags and left for Africa and then Latin America. He braved the weather, the food, guns, drug lords and competitors to set up a base. He networked with importers and pharmacies to forge deals in these semiregulated markets, which lack the stringency of the U.S. market. The early move to Latin America has differentiated Caplin because small Indian pharmas that choose to export typic

Talent pool and favourable system, notably a vast & growing youth talent pool, propel growth of SaaS in this metropolis, say experts While the information technology hub of Bengaluru has been compared with Silicon Valley in the US for start-ups in the sector for years, Chennai is trying to mark a place in the IT map as the hub for software as a service (SaaS). Many SaaS majors which compete directly with global leaders in their respective segments have Chennai as a home. For instance, Zoho Corporation, founded in 1996 as AdventNet Inc, launched its first cloud business app, Zoho Writer, in 2005. It competes directly with companies such as Microsoft in this market. Similarly, Freshdesk, started by Girish Mathrubootham in 2010, has been challenging the global leader in this space, Zendesk. It is one among the top three global SaaS-based customer support service entities, the company had said. It is also considered one of the few poised to soon grow beyond a billion dol