Drug company has a sad - faces threats

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Bloomberg Business Week has an article entitled Merck to Bristol-Myers Face More Threats on India Drug Patents.

A threat? What is it?


It seems that India has a compulsory licence process by which it can force pharma companies to allow Indian manufacturers to make their patented drugs more cheaply for sale in India. This could be a threat to the drug company's profits.

In the article there's a quote from the CEO of Bayer:

Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license “essentially theft.”

If up to a billion Indians get your patented drug at an Indian price, as opposed to the prices Americans pay, then that's a lot of lost profits, right? Poor CEO Marijn Dekkers.

But wait! The Bloomberg article goes on to quote Dekkers (total yearly compensation stated to be €5,623,000 or $7,692,826) as saying:

“We did not develop this medicine for Indians,” Dekkers said Dec. 3. “We developed it for western patients who can afford it.”

Ignoring for a moment what a normal person would feel like after they'd said that to the press, and assuming Dekker was just following orders, let's look at that again. 

"We did not develop this medicine for Indians."

So if Bayer didn't develop it for Indians, Bayer's expected profit from India was nothing - zero, none, zip, nowt. And if an Indian company makes the drug on the cheap and sells it to Indians, then Bayer's loss is (adds it up on her fingers...carry one...add number I first thought of...) is zero dollars, correct? Expected profit nothing, actual profit nothing* = no loss. 

But it's essentially theft.  :( 

Hope the $7.6 million a year goes a little way to cheering Dekkers up, the poor lamb.

*Didn't want to clutter the sarcasm with facts, but since it's a 'licence", Bayer probably gets some of the Indian drug company's profits, so they actually get more profit than if they'd continued to ignore India.