Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13853

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Wang SS.
AstraZeneca Reps Strike Gold in China’s Provinces
The Wall Street Journal 2008 Jun 13
http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/06/13/astrazeneca-finds-riches-in-chinas-provinces/

Full text:

Growing in emerging markets like China is a major goal these days in the drug industry, but the best strategy to reach doctors in the sprawling, heterogeneous Middle Kingdom isn’t clear.

AstraZeneca decided six years ago to shun the big cities that most of its competitors focused on, and instead cultivate relationships with local doctors and hospitals in smaller, far-flung locales, the WSJ reports. And the company poured money into hiring sales reps.

One unlikely hot spot: Xinjiang province, in China’s far west and more than twice the size of Texas, where AstraZeneca sales shot to $6.2 million in 2007, up from $1.1 million in 2002.

The strategy appears to have worked. AstraZeneca propelled itself to the top spot in the Chinese market in 2007, surpassing Pfizer. Sales of AstraZeneca drugs rose to $423 million last year from $85 million in 2001. During that time, the London-based company also increased its sales force five-fold to 2000 people. The company’s success has transformed the way drugs are sold in China, the WSJ says.

AstraZeneca had to crack which areas in China had the fastest growing incomes and people who could most afford the medication, as well as data to show “which hospital is hot, which doctor is hot,” Yin Xudong, head of AstraZeneca’s China operations, told the WSJ.

But the company has faced some major challenges, including government corruption and poaching of its successful sales reps by other drugmakers.