Divi’s Laboratories Brand Guidelines: A 1990 Research Firm Turned Hyderabad API Maker

A research firm, 1990.

Divi’s Laboratories, today based in Hyderabad, began in 1990. Forbes, in a profile last updated in September 2026, says the US-trained scientist Murali Divi founded the company that year as a drug research firm. English Wikipedia gives the founding date as 12 October 1990 and the first name as Divi’s Research Centre. In its early years, the same source says, the business developed commercial processes for making active pharmaceutical ingredients, or APIs, and intermediates: the chemical substances that drug companies turn into finished tablets, capsules and injections.

The research centre did not stay a research centre for long. In 1994 it changed its name to Divi’s Laboratories Limited, English Wikipedia says, to signal that it meant to make APIs and intermediates itself. Its first manufacturing plant followed in 1995 at Choutuppal, in what is now Telangana, and a second began work in 2002 at Chippada, near Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh. The company went public with an initial public offering on 17 February 2003, and in 2010 it opened a research centre in Hyderabad, according to the same article. Its shares trade on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange of India.

The company still carries the founder’s name, and the Divi family remains at its head: English Wikipedia lists Murali Divi as managing director and Satchandra Kiran Divi as chief executive, with the head office in Hyderabad’s Gachibowli district.

Ingredients, made to order.

Divi’s is, first of all, an ingredient maker. English Wikipedia describes it as a producer of generic APIs and intermediates that also carries out custom synthesis, making ingredients to order for other companies. Forbes describes it as among the world’s top suppliers of active pharmaceutical ingredients and says it also does custom manufacturing for large pharmaceutical companies.

A second line of business sits outside medicines. Through its subsidiary Divi’s Nutraceuticals, the group makes ingredients for supplements, foods, drinks and animal feed; that company’s website lists carotenoids such as beta-carotene, lutein and astaxanthin alongside vitamins such as D3. In September 2021 Divi’s Nutraceuticals announced CaroNat, a colouring ingredient made from concentrated carrot juice and intended to give foods and drinks a dark yellow to orange colour, the company said in a press release. The release described it as made only from ingredients of natural origin, without added silicon dioxide, and aimed at uses from drinks and yogurt to gummy sweets and cakes. English Wikipedia also lists subsidiaries in the United States and Europe, including Divi’s Laboratories Europe AG.

Manufacturing is concentrated in two southern Indian states. English Wikipedia lists a unit and a special-economic-zone unit at Choutuppal, and an export-oriented unit and several special-economic-zone units at Chippada. A third site has since been added: on 3 January 2025 Angel One reported that Divi’s had begun commercial operations at Unit III, a greenfield export-oriented unit at Ontimamidi village near Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh. The first phase covers about 200 acres of the 500-acre site, the report said, and the project had been in the pipeline since 2021. The same report placed the new unit alongside the company’s two existing manufacturing locations, near Hyderabad and near Visakhapatnam, and described Divi’s as known for making both non-potent and highly potent APIs as well as low-dose products. The report counted more than 64 production buildings and 70 pharma suites across those two older locations.

The company has also had a US regulatory episode. In March 2017 the US Food and Drug Administration placed import alerts on its Unit II at Visakhapatnam, under codes the FDA uses for firms that refuse a foreign inspection and for plants that have not met good manufacturing practice, and later issued a warning letter, according to company filings reported by the Press Trust of India. The first alert was lifted in July 2017. In November 2017 the FDA closed out the warning letter, and the company said the remaining import alert had been removed from the FDA website on 14 November 2017, Medical Dialogues reported on 16 November 2017.

Design and documentation.

India’s drug makers are spread across several states, and some regions have become clusters. English Wikipedia’s article on the pharmaceutical industry in Gujarat calls Ahmedabad and Vadodara the state’s pharmaceutical hubs and records that the state government declared Gujarat a “pharma hub” in 2000; Torrent Pharma’s plants at Chhatral and Dahej are in the same state. Glenmark’s August 2026 factsheet lists formulation plants in Goa, Sikkim, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra, as well as in Argentina, the United States and the Czech Republic.

Many of the companies in this guide began as family firms and still carry their founders’ stories. Glenmark’s name, English Wikipedia says, was made from the names of its founder’s two sons; Torrent Pharma started in 1959 as Trinity Laboratories and belongs to a group that also runs power and gas businesses. Where a company’s history rests only on its own website, this guide says so.

The industry has its own meeting places. CPHI India, the Informa trade fair that bills itself as “the heart of South Asia’s pharma,” runs from 23 to 26 November 2026 at the IICC in Delhi, alongside the PMEC India machinery show at Greater Noida, according to its website. DCAT Week, which calls itself “the premier event for the global bio/pharmaceutical business ecosystem,” is next held in New York City from 15 to 18 March 2027.

This guide looks at how each company presents itself — in plant photographs, laboratory imagery, packs, founder portraits and corporate colours — and sets out what can be checked about each one: who founded it, who owns it and where it says its medicines are made, marking clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family name over three manufacturing sites.

Today Divi’s Laboratories is a listed company based in Hyderabad, making APIs and intermediates at Choutuppal, Visakhapatnam and, since January 2025, Kakinada, and selling carotenoids and vitamins through its nutraceuticals arm. Every manufacturing site named in the sources above is in Telangana or Andhra Pradesh. Its chief executive and managing director both come from the founding family, and its research centre and head office are in the same city where the business began as Divi’s Research Centre more than three decades ago.

For a design guide, Divi’s Laboratories shows how a business-to-business chemistry company can build an identity on a founder’s name and on its plants rather than on consumer brands. Compare Dr. Reddy’s, another Hyderabad company that started in active pharmaceutical ingredients, and Aurobindo, a Hyderabad generics group. For this guide we use a process green, a steel grey and a carotene amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Divi’s Laboratories’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.