Hutong West
Watching Louis Malle films
0813 hrs
I’m a little late to the bar with my take on this, but here it is, in three parts. Experienced China hands – go straight to the third section below.
When I first joined a global PR firm in China in 2000, I spent one day in my first week reviewing potential clients with my new boss. While my beat at the time was technology companies, I suggested we also look at pursuing some healthcare clients, maybe the big pharmaceutical companies. Surely, I thought, growing prosperity would send the demand for medicines skyrocketing, but local challengers would bring increasingly heated competition. A high-profit industry vulnerable to local competition sounded like the ideal client for us.
My boss gave a derisive snort and told me to forget big pharma. Seeing my confusion and taking pity upon the ignorant, she softened, and then gave me an eye-opening education in the ways of the pharmaceutical business in China. I won’t recount the details, but the gist was that pharmaceutical firms didn’t need public relations, because, allegedly, they marketed their wares in a rather more straightforward manner: they simply spiffed hospitals and physicians for prescribing the drugs.
Why spend money on PR, the thinking went, if what you needed was sacks of cash? I promptly forgot about Big Pharma in China until two weeks ago. Now it is clear that the plight of GSK and its cohorts is something none of us should forget.
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The China operation of GSK stands accused of price fixing, of bribing doctors and hospitals by funneling those funds through travel agencies, hiding the bribes as travel costs and thus engaging in fraudulent financial accounting, and of conducting an internal investigation that failed to turn up any of these actions – actions the company now acknowledges were perpetrated by at least some employees.
This is an ugly litany, but it is not a new one. For over a decade it has been something of an open secret that some major pharmaceutical firms have been pursuing some variant of the pay-for-prescribe model. Doubtless, over the years many of those companies were counseled to cease such practices by employees and advisers. (There is some speculation as to why GSK was singled out as the monkey that would kill the chicken, but I’ll leave that to others.)
But one wonders whether, under the circumstances, GSK had a choice. It is a China business truism is that once a company has been through the market entry obstacle course and has begun generating (often spectacular) profits here, the pressure to sustain and grow that flow of cash is enormous. News about a company’s business in China moves the share price, and the prospects for business in the PRC is a key topic at a growing number of quarterly earnings calls. And the question is never “how” a company is doing business in China, but “how much.”
Capital, like justice, is willfully blind.
In a market where doctors make a pittance, where hospitals are overwhelmed yet constrained from charging reasonable rates for care, the medical profession aches for streams of revenue that will keep the wheels on, if not line the otherwise threadbare pockets of underpaid physicians and administrators. Pharmaceutical companies foreign and domestic offer a ready source of cash, inciting a practice so pervasive that any drug firm unwilling to pony-up is simply not in the game. Add those pressures together, and a company could find itself fairly pushed down a slippery slope.
Having invested heavily for years in people and facilities and immersed in an industry where “everyone does it” and apparently gets away with it, it is easy to see why a company like GSK might be tempted – nay, compelled – to engage in behavior considered unethical or illegal elsewhere. At that point, the only alternative was to pack up and leave. This, it seems, was never an option.
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And that is precisely the point.
GSK and several other multinational pharmaceutical firms look set to undergo a public revelation of the ugliest parts of their China businesses. That these revelations will damage the companies prospects in the world’s largest market is a given. All that remains to be seen is how far the Chinese government is prepared to go in sanctioning these companies for their past behavior.
Those events will take their own course. What must concern us now is a more urgent question: what other industries in China hide similar practices?
Already in the past week the Chinese government has taken to task the handful of international firms supplying infant formula to the Chinese market. The charge: price-fixing. Never mind that local companies in the same industry, by taking production shortcuts, have earned a reputation for sickening and killing children with their product, and that parents able to afford it in desperation have taken to buying imported formula often smuggled from abroad.
In so doing the government has sent a powerful message not once, but twice: no industry or company, however vital to the well-being of the Chinese people, will be allowed to engage in illegal and unethical business practices, and the foreign firms will be punished first and with greatest vigor.
In so doing, the government accomplishes three aims: it slows or stops practices likely to enrage the populace; it sends an unequivocal warning to its own local industry; and it cripples or eliminates foreign competition for its own local firms.
To every other multinational company in every other industry in China, ask not for whom the bell tolls. Xi Jinping’s administration has put the world on notice that no matter what local firms do, unethical and illegal business practices on the part of multinationals in China will no longer be tolerated, and in fact they’re coming for the foreigners first.
It is time for an immediate and thorough self-examination for the kinds of business practices that will not withstand government or public scrutiny. The time to clean up is right now, even if it cost contracts, relationships, and hard-won business. Failure to do so only puts off the reckoning and ensures that the cost will be much higher when that reckoning comes.
And there is one more lesson for the leaders and directors of any company that does or would do business in China, perhaps the most important of all.
A company entering the China market may well decide how much it is willing to spend in time, resources, and capital to attempt success there. No board worth its name would underwrite a leap into the PRC with a blank check: at some point, the cost is higher than it is worth. There would be no shame in such a decision, if for no other reason than the list of companies who have given up on China after finding no long-term payoff is long and distinguished.
But it is rare to find a company that has set an explicit limit on how far it is willing to go ethically to succeed in China, to say “here are the things we will absolutely not do in order to win in this market,” and gain board and shareholder support for that initiative. The readiness to define how much a company is willing to invest in the pursuit of success in China, but the failure to define how far it is willing to go to do so is what ensnares good companies like GSK in a web of worst practices.
And that is the lesson for all of us: if we do not draw a line in the ethical sand, stating in advance that our success in China will not be won at the cost of our ethical bottom line, we are effectively licensing the people building and operating our offices and operations in the PRC to do anything in the pursuit of financial gain.
Whatever your ethics, the Chinese government is now making clear the practical costs of pursuing such a path. If there is a future for foreign enterprise in the PRC, it belongs to companies who are prepared to live and die by a better standard of behavior, not to those who follow the lead of the meanest actors in the market.
Related articles
- Kill a GSK chicken to frighten the monkeys (janeparry.wordpress.com)
- Big Pharma in a little trouble in China (economist.com)
- Big Pharma Giant Accused of Massive Bribery and Corruption in China (darkgovernment.com)
- Is Big Pharma Addicted to Fraud? (biospace.com)
- GSK: China law may have been broken (bbc.co.uk)
- Big Pharma’s Lurid Tactics Under Fire In China – With Consequences In The US (zerohedge.com)