Which multinational pharmaceutical company was the first that has entered South Korea? It was Bayer Korea that is headquartered in Germany. The time when this company came to Korea was 1955, which was 2 year after the end of the Korean War (1950 – 1953). Bayer established its Korean branch then and started its full business operation. This year marks the 67th anniversary of their entrance into Korea. Bayer introduced crop protectants such as weed killers of its agricultural business unit rather than pharmaceuticals in the early days. Then, in 1985, it built the Banwol factory for animal medicine, and was established as today’s Bayer Korea in 1989. Since then, Bayer Korea has been supplying and selling pharmaceuticals in full scale. Its main products include ‘Xarelto’, an anticoagulant, ‘Nexavar’, a drug for progressive kidney cancer, and ‘Aspirin Protect’, a cardiovascular drug.
In South Korea, over 40 multinational pharmaceutical companies are competing in drug marketing. The US, British and European multinational pharmaceutical companies founded branches in South Korea, and sell innovative drug products. Among them, the company with the highest sales is Pfizer Korea. Before splitting Upjohn, Pfizer Korea boasted the highest sales among multinational pharmaceutical companies, with annual sales of nearly 800 billion won. Its representative products include 'Champix', a smoking cessation aid, 'Prevenar', a pneumococcal vaccine, and 'Xeljanz', a rheumatoid arthritis drug. Pfizer Korea made a so-called ‘jackpot’ in sales last year. It has surpassed sales of 1 trillion won for the first time among the multinational pharmaceutical companies. It was thanks to its rapid effort of producing and supplying its Covid vaccine under the Covid-19 pandemic situation. Pfizer Korea recorded its highest ever sales record of 1.694 trillion won. It was an increase over the previous year’s sales of 391.9 billion won by 332.2%. It was known that the vaccine sales accounted for 1.3 trillion won among 1.694 trillion won. Pfizer Korea enjoyed the full vaccine effect.
However, it has been criticized for having invested only 400 million won in CSR to fulfill its social duty as a multinational pharmaceutical company. It is pointed out that the company is doing too few CSR activities for its total sales. Pfizer Korea invested 370 million won in CSR last year. On the other hand, AstraZeneca Korea, headquartered in the UK, invested 2.5 billion won in CSR last year. The difference in the amount of investment is stark compared with Pfizer Korea. AstraZeneca Korea also introduced and sold its vaccine in Korea during the pandemic. This led AstraZeneca Korea to recording the sales of 655.3 billion won during the same period. It was an increase by 31.6% compared with the previous year (498.1 billion won). CSR refers to corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility is divided into four categories of profit generation, legal compliance, ethical responsibility, and philanthropic responsibility. Among them, profit generation places a social responsibility on a company as the basic social economic unit to produce goods and services. It is questionable whether Pfizer Korea is fulfilling such social responsibility. Pfizer Korea celebrates its 53rd anniversary this year.
[WIKI KOREA=Cho Pil Hyun, Staff Reporter]
chop23@wikileaks-kr.org
