Hikma Brand Guidelines: Samih Darwazah’s 1978 Amman Company and the 2018 Coral Wordmark

A pharmacist returns from Italy.

Hikma Pharmaceuticals is a multinational maker of generic and in-licensed medicines, headquartered in London and listed on the London Stock Exchange, according to English Wikipedia. It began in Jordan: Samih Darwazah founded it in Amman in 1978, a date given by Wikipedia, by the company and by a 2013 case study published by the regional business platform Wamda with the American University in Cairo’s business school.

Wamda’s account, dated 20 October 2013, traces the founder’s path. Darwazah studied pharmacy at the American University of Beirut, went to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship to study medical science, and then spent 12 years in Italy working for a multinational pharmaceutical company before returning to Jordan to start Hikma.

The early years were regional. Wamda says the company concentrated on winning US FDA approval and on selling into Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and that for a time it even accepted barter — peanuts in Syria, sesame in Sudan. Hikma’s own history says that in the 1980s it built what it calls the first FDA-inspected manufacturing plant in the region, and bought land in Portugal to build a sterile plant for injectable medicines, its first step outside the Middle East. Wamda says the Portuguese plant was working by 2001.

Leadership moved within the family. In 1995, Wamda reports, Samih Darwazah became Jordan’s Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources, and his son Said Darwazah ran the company as chief executive for the next eight years; the founder returned in 2003 with the aim of taking Hikma public.

West-Ward, London and a run of acquisitions.

The United States came first among the big markets. Wamda dates Hikma’s purchase of the American generics maker West-Ward Pharmaceuticals to 1991, and English Wikipedia says that in August 1996 Hikma became the first Arab company to export medicines to the US. In 2005 Hikma listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The listing paid for growth by acquisition. Wikipedia and the company’s history list Instituto Biochimico Pavese in Italy in 2005, which the company describes as a plant for freeze-dried injectables; Jazeera Pharmaceutical Industries in Saudi Arabia in 2006; and, in 2007, the Arab Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Company in Jordan, Alkan Pharma in Egypt and the German oncology companies Thymoorgan and Ribosepharm. Hikma completed the purchase of Baxter’s US multi-source injectables business in May 2011, entered Morocco in October 2011 by buying Promopharm, opened Al Dar Al Arabia in Algeria the same year and bought Egypt’s EPCI in 2012, according to Wikipedia.

The US business grew further. The company lists the assets of Bedford Laboratories and Ben Venue Laboratories and then Roxane Laboratories of Columbus, Ohio, which it says transformed its position in the US. In the 2020s it bought Teligent, expanding into Canada, the US injectables company Custopharm, and the US finished-dose business of Xellia, with a plant in Cleveland, Ohio, and a research centre in Zagreb. In June 2020, Wikipedia says, Boehringer Ingelheim announced it would sell most of its shareholding in Hikma.

Today Hikma describes three businesses: Injectables, sold to hospitals in North America, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa; Branded, across 17 markets in that region; and Hikma Rx, its US generics and specialty business. It says it runs 29 manufacturing plants and three research hubs; Wikipedia places its plants in ten countries, among them the US, Portugal, Italy, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Germany and Egypt. The company also says that in 2025 it became the largest pharmaceutical company in the Middle East and North Africa by sales.

Generic and specialty medicine makers.

Generic-medicine makers sell products that are, by design, meant to match medicines already on the market. That leaves their visual identity with an unusual job: it has to signal reliability and scale rather than novelty, and it often has to work on thousands of packs at once.

The pictures these companies publish tend to repeat a small set of scenes. There are close-ups of blister packs and plain white tablets, shot clean and bright against pale backgrounds. There are pharmacists at a counter handing a box across to a customer, a moment that puts a person between the product and the patient. And there are wide views of large production sites, with long corridors, stainless steel and staff in white coats and hairnets, used to suggest capacity and control.

Packaging is where the system shows most clearly. Because one company may carry a very large range of molecules and strengths, its packs usually rely on a fixed layout with colour bands, stripes or blocks that separate one product or dose from another, while the company name stays in the same place on every box. Corporate material then widens the frame: maps, globes and lines linking continents, meant to picture supply reaching many countries.

The same language appears on the trade-show floor. At industry fairs such as CPHI, where ingredient suppliers, contract manufacturers and generics companies meet, stands lean on large logos, simple colour fields and photographs of laboratories and plants. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a clear name, a disciplined colour system and imagery that keeps attention on trust and access.

One name, one full stop.

For years Hikma kept the names of the companies it bought; Wamda noted in 2013 that it sometimes left an acquired brand unchanged when that name was already trusted locally. That changed on 26 June 2018. In a press release issued from Eatontown, New Jersey, Hikma announced that its US subsidiary, West-Ward Pharmaceuticals Corp., would now operate as Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., as part of a global rebranding marking the group’s 40th anniversary that brought all its subsidiary brands under one refreshed Hikma brand, with a new positioning and visual identity.

The same release described the new mark in unusual detail. It is a wordmark, the company said, with the name “in precisely drawn and spaced lettering,” set in lower-case letters that it called friendly and approachable, and finished with a full stop meant to convey “certainty and confidence, as well as a nod to the digital age.” Its coral colour, the release said, is connected to the legacy red of the original Hikma logo, “re-interpreted in a contemporary hue.” At the time Hikma said it had about 8,500 employees, more than 2,000 of them in the US. Building signs, company materials and the website changed at once, and new packaging and labels were to follow over 12 to 18 months; the European launch came the same week.

For a design guide, Hikma shows how a group built by acquisition can gather its companies under one short, precisely set name. Compare Sandoz and Viatris, two other generics makers. For this guide we use a coral and a slate with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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