The article in the url below profiles Yusuf Hamied, the CEO and largest shareholder of Cipla, a firm in India that breaks pharmaceutical patents by copying drugs and selling them at vastly reduced prices (Issues: Patents, p253). This business model has turned Cipla into one of India’s largest firms and “the largest supplier of antiretroviral drugs in the world”:
“To his supporters, Hamied has saved countless lives by making medicines affordable. But to his critics - above all the large western pharmaceuticals who first developed the drugs - he is a ''pirate'', an opportunist who has exploited others' intellectual property to swell his own profits. In the process, they say, he is undermining investment in future medicines, including the next generation of HIV therapies.”
The business model is extended across the board to hundreds of different kinds of drugs:
“We have more products than any (drug) company in the world,'' Hamied says. ''More than a thousand for humans, and a hundred for animals. That's because they are, in inverted commas, 'copy products'.”
Rather than a threat to the large western pharmaceutical firms, however, Hamied argues that he wants to collaborate with them to broaden the markets to which they can supply and for which there is overwhelming demand for pharmaceutical products:
“Hamied argues that western drug companies should - at best in exchange for modest royalties - allow generic producers to compete by making their medicines available immediately at the lowest possible cost, giving access to many more patients who would not otherwise be able to buy them.”
Needless to say, Cipla has run into significant resistance:
“''The first six months were absolute hell, as big pharma tried to run us down,'' [Hamied] says. Richard Sykes, head of Glaxo, denounced Hamied as a ''pirate'' and described the quality of Indian generic drugs as ''iffy''. Hamied fired back, saying that the company was a ''global serial killer'' for charging such high prices.”
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
The man who battled big pharma.
By ANDREW JACK
2829 words
29 March 2008
Financial Times
Surveys MAG1
Page 14
http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto032820081826526065
