Now the third largest generic and specialty pharmaceuticals company in the
world, Mylan started small; it had only a handful of employees and a single
office when it was founded in West Virginia in 1961 by two U.S. Army buddies:
Milan Puskar and Don Panoz.
Mylan began as a distributor, buying finished goods and reselling them to
pharmacies and physicians, but in 1966 it received approval from the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration to manufacture its first medicine, Penicillin G. Three
years later, it added another antibiotic, Tetracylcine, to its manufacturing
portfolio.
With its production capabilities growing, Mylan began distributing its own
finished goods to other major pharmaceutical companies, such as Parke-Davis. By
the 1980s, the company's rapid expansion and success as a distributor and
manufacturer had earned it a place on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1984, the
company broke new ground with the introduction of an antihypertensive called
Maxzide®, making Mylan the first generics manufacturer in the world to patent a
new drug. It was a harbinger of the company's future research and development
capabilities, which would help it build one of the most robust product
pipelines in the business.
Mylan's geographic presence expanded steadily through the mid-1980s and into
the 1990s, as the company built a national distribution center in North
Carolina, added a manufacturing facility in Puerto Rico and acquired several
companies. Two of the most important were the acquisition of Bertek Inc., an
innovator of transdermal drug systems, and UDL Laboratories, the largest
unit-dose packaged product pharmaceutical company in the U.S.
By 1995, Mylan had created the most dispensed line of pharmaceuticals – branded
or generic – in the U.S. Seven years later, it achieved an important milestone,
generating sales of more than $1 billion.
At about the same time, Robert J. Coury, long one of the company's trusted
advisors, joined Mylan as CEO and proceeded to transform it.
For instance, he took Mylan global in 2007, acquiring a 71.5% controlling
interest in Matrix Laboratories Limited, a Hyderabad, India-based supplier of
active pharmaceutical ingredients. As a result, the company's footprint
expanded to include India, Europe, China and South Africa. Just a few months
later, Coury completed an even larger acquisition, when he won a bidding war
for Germany-based Merck KGaA's generics business. With that acquisition, the
company achieved a global scale and reach matched by only a few other generic
pharmaceuticals firms. Mylan now has commercial operations in more than 140
countries and territories.
Today, Mylan is an industry leader, with a portfolio of more than 900 separate
products and a team of approximately 15,500 employees. Certainly, it's a far
different company than it was in 1961, but the simple principle on which it was
founded remains to this day the driving force behind its continuing success.
That principle: Mylan brings high quality, affordable medicines to people who
need them. This principle has served Mylan, its customers and its shareholders
well for nearly 50 years, and it will continue to do so for many years to come.