Taken from public personality Facebook status.Should I give name of poster here?
Why Indian companies, highly successful in India, fail miserably abroad. They, like Indian politicians, can survive only in an atmosphere of corruption, illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, and other vices.
Once there was a company called Ranbaxy Labs. It had a wonderful reputation: it was profitable, it was pioneering. In fact, its reputation could even be called saintly: after all, did it not manufacture generic drugs, all manner of life-saving medicines? Was it not curing AIDS in Africa? Are not such companies deserving of admiration, capable of making a profit and yet selling affordable medicines? Ranbaxy was the backbone of a pharmaceutical sector of which we in India were told to be proud—and Indians don’t need to be told twice to be proud of something.
Well, one sad and tragic day, the people who built Ranbaxy decided to sell it to a Japanese company called Daiichi Sankyo. The good people of Daiichi Sankyo had done their due diligence: they had inspected the books, talked to managers, toured the plants, and come to the conclusion that, yes, they were worthy of buying the gem that was Ranbaxy, the first foreign company to sell generic medicines in the US. When Ranbaxy was sold, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth in India; a precious jewel had been given away for something as crass as money. India mourned.
Daiichi Sankyo paid $4.6 billion for two-thirds of Ranbaxy in 2008. They must have thought they’d got an exceptionally good deal—the very last act of selfless altruism performed by Ranbaxy’s promoters. Six years later, the Japanese were glad to sell what remained of Ranbaxy to one of its competitors, for $3.2 billion. The company had lost half its value in six years.
It turned out they’d been sold a placebo. Here’s a little bit of what was actually going on in Ranbaxy, the pride of Indian pharma. Just a taste. In one plant’s supposedly sanitized room where medicines were made, there were flies ‘too numerous to count’.40 Elsewhere, the refrigerators that were supposed to keep samples at a predetermined low temperature were broken, with pools of water from melted ice inside. Some of the pills chosen at random and inspected had what seemed to be hair from an employee’s arm; others had compressed and mysterious black spots that turned out to be the oil that lubricated the plant’s machinery. And, to top off the ewww factor, one factory didn’t have any running water in the toilets, so no employee had been able to wash their hands for a really long time. Remember, this is a medicine factory.
Meanwhile, it turned out that the medicines they were making weren’t just full of nasty stuff, they didn’t work to start off with. Ranbaxy had to plead guilty to felony charges in the United States, because some of the medicines they were making were ‘adulterated’; they had to pay a $500-million fine.
One by one, Ranbaxy’s plants were declared unsafe; eventually not one of the four could still export to the US—the major market for its generic version of Lipitor, taken by the millions of Americans who’re watching their cholesterol levels. Millions of Ranbaxy’s Lipitor tablets had to be recalled from chemists across the US when glass particles were discovered in them.
Craziest of all, it turned out Ranbaxy had been methodically falsifying its test records. Batch after batch of its generics was shown as genuine in the test documents—all of which were invented. Regulators in South Africa realized that AIDS drugs from the saintly people at Ranbaxy were little better than placebos when all the test data for various different batches turned out to be identical—and photocopied. They didn’t even do a good job with the faking. Well, sometimes they tried harder with the faking. On one occasion, they forged some documentation about data they had to show regulators, which was supposed to be from years earlier—and, to take that new-paper feel away, they aged it in a steam room overnight.
In other words, in some parts of the world, it was just presenting completely false data. In Brazil, of the 163 medicines that it was selling, it had properly tested only eight. Every step of the way, Ranbaxy behaved like a good Indian teenager taking a test: it cheated when it could, and gamed the test when it couldn’t cheat. Sometimes, former employees claimed, it would just buy brand-name drugs, and submit them to the FDA as its own in order to pass the tests.
All this was known to managers in 2004. Two brave managers, both relatively fresh hires, launched an investigation; one eventually got to say his piece to the company’s board. According to Fortune magazine, he told the board that ‘more than 200 products in more than 40 countries’ had ‘elements of data that were fabricated to support business needs’. He wound up urging a recall of major drugs, and coming clean to regulators. Fortune says, ‘Kumar completed the presentation to a silent boardroom. Only one director, a scientist, showed any surprise about the findings. The others appeared more astonished by Kumar’s declaration that if he was not given full authority to fix the problems, he would resign.’ Naturally, he quit in two days.
According to Fortune, elaborate falsification of data was discussed at length in email chains that included Ranbaxy’s CEO and a member of the family that owned it. On one conference call, when the uselessness of its AIDS drugs in Africa was discussed, a senior executive apparently said: ‘Who cares? It’s just blacks dying.’ Remember, all this was, at the very least, known internally before Ranbaxy’s owners sold it to the Japanese. As one US regulator said, the company’s culture was ‘corrupt to the core’. I suppose it’s a small step from concealing the kind of drugs you’re making before you sell them to concealing the kind of company you’re running before you sell it. --Source: Restart India: The Last Chance for Indian Economy by Mihir Sharma
The former owners of Ranbaxy now run one of India’s largest hospital chains (Fortis Healthcare and Religare Wellness).
Submitted November 30, 2017 at 07:37PM by GandBuddy http://ift.tt/2irTsh5 india
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