Our History
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.