Way back when I was in B school the burning question in the Indian pharmaceutical industry was the expiring patents of the global pharmaceutical companies. The top among the list was Lipitor the anti hypertensive drug that was fuelling most of Pfizer’s revenues.

Lipitor was the first drug to exceed $10 billion a year in sales, and accounted for almost one-quarter of Pfizer’s revenue in the last decade. But all that has changed once Lipitor comes off the paptent list on November 30th. This allows companies like Ranbaxy to launch the gheneric version of Lipitor with a