Ajay Dhankhar is a Senior Partner in McKinsey’s Pharmaceutical and Medical Products (PMP) practice, an expert on the global pharmaceutical and biotech industries and the global leader of McKinsey-PMP’s Strategy, M&A, Finance and Risk practices. During his career, Ajay has led McKinsey’s client service with several leading companies across North America, Europe and Asia helping them increase R&D productivity, forge value creating M&A, IPO and JV transactions, seamlessly manage large scale post-merger integrations, and drive organic growth.

Over the last 21 years, his client impact has been in five broad areas:

• Executing and post-merger managing 15+ deals, including 6 where $1bn+ cost and revenue synergies were extracted, one of the Top-5 largest financial restructuring of a PMP company, a series of transactions over 5 years that transformed an industry and 3 multi-party transactions
• R&D licensing and productivity improvement ideas, including initiatives that segmented client’s pipeline by risk and value with different systems to manage each, re-organized R&D to improve accountability, increased externalization of R&D and accelerated cross-unit collaboration
• Developing growth strategies for five of the World’s Top-20 healthcare companies, including initiatives that improved pricing to drive $1bn+ NPV, and improved sales force efficiency and effectiveness by 20-30%
• Creating significant value from Asia-Pacific markets for multiple global PMP companies via acquisitions, detailed country strategies, and off-shoring initiatives in IT/BPO, manufacturing, R&D
• Helping the Indian healthcare industry become more globally competitive

Selected recent internal McKinsey and external publications include:

“Managing the health of early-stage discovery” in Nature Reviews DD, "Thought Starters to Spur US-India Biopharma Collaboration” - an annual report published from 2008-10; and 2013-2014. “Healthcare in India: The Road Ahead,” – a book published in 2002; “Vision 2020 for the Indian pharmaceutical industry,” and many others.

Ajay received his MPhil and his PhD degrees in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale where he was a University fellow and a Miles Award finalist. Ajay’s undergraduate degrees were in Physics and Computer Science, both summa cum laude, and he was a Presidential award winner for being the most distinguished graduating senior. Ajay also enjoys golf and skiing with his family (wife and 2 sons) and friends.