Posted By Damjan DeNoble
Pfizer has been on both the winning and the losing sides of China patent and trademark laws since 2002. If anything, it has learned just how different a playing field China is than the rest of the world, and that access to this potentially rich pharma market has to be earned. That’s why the announcement by Pfizer and PlaNet finance, “to conduct an in-depth research project on the health care needs of the working poor in China,” should be amusing new to many experienced China watchers for the sheer fact that it is a testament to just how ‘Chinese’ Pfizer has become.
At this point Pfizer would fit right in with local and provincial level Chinese officials soberly putting padded red envelope donations in boxes for the Sichuan relief efforts on live television, and staring intently into cameras for a few seconds before making the drop, so as to make sure that their faces were clearly caught by the upper level cadres watching the proceedings. Even the mission statement present in the article screams “I get it. We gotta co-operate to get some state level love.”
Pfizer’s mission in China is to meet the diverse medical needs of the country’s population through a broad portfolio of innovative medicines and partnerships with local healthcare providers, academics, and government in order to support the rapid development of the country’s healthcare system.
From the tone of it Pfizer sounds more like an NGO or a university health department than a multi-billion dollar per year, corporate giant. (To be clear, I am not criticizing, but most vigorously applauding Pfizer’s China shrewdness – it’s not a common enough thing here in China.)
What better way to ingratiate yourself with the Chinese government than to help the country’s rural poor?I had a professor in college that used to work with Merck, and one thing she said that stuck is to always look for why pharmaceuticals do certain outreach projects. What I found that semester is that with Asian country’s in particular, pharmaceuticals have found public health projects to be great tools in the fight for market share.
With that little piece of wisdom firmly in mind, I am interested to see what big initiative Pfizer will announce in the coming year.
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[...] a year ago I made a post about how Pfizer had really become a veteran Chinese hand, after it had agreed to conduct a study on the needs of China's rural poor. This was seven years [...]