Dr.Arokiaswamy Velumani
Thyrocare’s Velumani: Owns no car, lives in a small quarter, but helms a Rs 1,320-crore company.
Velumani doesn’t own a car. He makes do with a small living quarters above his large lab in Navi Mumbai, but still ends up sleeping in the lab most nights.
Born to a poor landless farmer in a nondescript and obscure village of Appanickenpatti Padur in Tamil Nadu, Arokiaswamy Velumani found himself at the bottom of the ‘ten slices of the pyramid’.
Velumani was so poor that he sought government subsidy to go through school and college.
Today, he is the owner of the world’s largest thyroid testing company, that boasts of 1,122 outlets across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and the Middle East!
He started his career as a shift chemist at Gemini Capsules, a small pharmaceutical company in Coimbatore, in 1979 and earned a measly sum of ₹150 every month. The curtains came down on the company three years later and Velumani found himself without a job.
After 14 years of servitude at BARC, Velumani put in his papers. He decided to channel his expertise in thryoid biochemistry to set up testing labs that detected thryoid disorders. With Rs. 1,00,000 from his provident fund, Velumani, at the age of 37, opened a shop in Byculla, South Mumbai.
Thyrocare is worth ₹3,377 crore ( on may 2016 ) and has made its debut on Indian bourses! Velumani owns a 64% stake in the company, which makes him worth ₹2,158 crore!
But it doesn’t end there for Velumani and his team. Thyrocare is also working towards developing a subsidiary to focus on cancer screening through molecular imaging.
