| By Industry Interview - Meettheboss.T.V |
| Tuesday, 16 March 2010 |
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Earlier this week, we provided highlights of theexclusive interview
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Adam Burns Meet The Boss T.V
between Adam Burns, from Meettheboss.tv and Jorge Puente, Regional President of WW Pfizer. Today we are pleased to provide the full interview.
Adam Burns: Firstly, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to the interview; it’s incredibly kind of you. So, in 2008, first time every, Pfizer’s worldwide revenues outstrip the U.S. revenues. Clearly it’s been a period of change, what sort of strategic lessons have you drawn from the last 12 to 18 months?
Jorge Puente: Well, you know, this has been really a very interesting time for us because I started working at Pfizer when it was really a U.S. company, primarily. In fact, I’ll tell you a small anecdote, I was invited one day, I had been working for about two years, and I was invited one day to go to Europe for a lecture.
I said, “Who’s inviting me,” and they gave me the name of the person and the job title, and he had the same job title I did except that he was in Pfizer International. I said, “There’s an international division,” because I was in charge of the U.S. operations at that time.
So we’ve gone from that to now having most of our revenues coming from overseas markets. It actually reflects the transformation Pfizer has done from being a U.S. centric, local operating company, to a true global company where you really cannot tell whether the priorities are based on a geographical area or the priorities are based on customers.
I would like to essentially say that what I’m seeing right now, especially in the last three years, we have this customer oriented philosophy and we are there for the customer first. Now, who is the customer? The patient.
We have this very patient centric view, and naturally if you want to do that you have to be global because the needs of patients in the United States can be very different than the needs of patients in the rest of the world, or in Asia.
That’s why we’ve developed the strategies that are very specific to the geographies where we operate.
Adam Burns: Absolutely. We’ll move on hopefully to talk about the strategies in a moment. I can understand, obviously, the complete business benefit of what change of focus, but where does that position Pfizer? Where do you want Pfizer to be seen? What are your USPs now?
Jorge Puente: Well, where we would like to be is essentially the company where a patient who is asked to think of somebody who is a true partner in the healthcare space thinks of Pfizer
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first. Because we’re not only providing medications that in many cases are life medications that in many cases are life saving for that patient, in other cases improve quality of life, but also because we provide information to those patients that’s essential and important to work with their physicians in making the decisions that are relevant to their day-to-day care.
As the population ages, and this is a universal phenomenon where the percentage of people who are over 65 years of age is growing by leaps and bounds, essentially, and together with that you develop, of course, morbidities that are going to become much more prevalent: diabetes, lung disease, cancers, etcetera.
So we’re going to have a larger percentage of our patients having more and more conditions that they need to manage, they need to do it in an educated way, and they need to have to have information.
We’re actually in a very good position to provide that information, because in the process of doing research for the medicines we develop, we learn a lot about these conditions, about the way the affect patients, the way the treatments affect patients, and what’s the best way for physicians to communicate with their patients.
So the universe of the things that we need to do, by definition, all together is part of a single capsule, so to speak, where the knowledge transfer from the company to our customers involves not just knowledge about the pill, but also knowledge about the disease, about the adverse events that may come from treating the medications.
As you know medications are in some cases decisions about benefit and risk, and when the benefit outweighs the risk significantly, that’s a good reason to take a medication.
Sometimes that’s not the case, and for one patient this benefit/risk ratio may be different than for another patient. Obviously that changes with geography because conditions are also very geography determined.
So that what works in the United States might not be necessarily the same as in Asia, and we need to have a completely different set of priorities in communicating to those patients in different geographies.
Adam Burns: Of course, interesting though, that you talk about an aging population. Now Japan, of course, it’s there, it has this problem already. Previously you mentioned Pfizer international, the anecdote about you didn’t even know there was an international department; is the company better at talking to itself?
If you go to Japan and you learn those lessons because there is an aging population, are you feeding that back better into the company?
Jorge Puente: Well, you know, this happened a long time ago. If you look at the company then and the company now, and I will actually go a little further than that, you’ll say you look at Pfizer ten years ago and you look at the company now, completely different companies.
We’re so attuned to the needs of our customers so that when we go to Japan we know exactly what’s going on in Japan, what the needs of the Japanese organization are. In fact, the decisions are being made within the Japanese organization. I’m not sure whether you have learned about the
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fact that recently Pfizer actually completely reorganized the way we operate by breaking ourselves into business units.
So that we are not actually one single company now, we’re a collection of small units, each one of those completely focused on a specific area. So we have, for example, an oncology unit, which is where I work. Well, everything related to cancer rests with this unit.
It’s a small unit, there is 100 percent accountability within that unit for all the decisions that are being made in the cancer space, and of course we’re in very direct contact, of course, with Japan. So the Japanese colleagues are making the recommendations that are necessary for our best way of working in that space.
The Europeans are making the recommendations that are best for working with European patients, and same thing in the United States. So in my unit we have three regional presidents, one for the U.S., one for Europe, and one for Asia, Japan, which is me. The three of us communicate constantly.
We have weekly with our management team and we go over the priorities that exist in every single region of the world, we try to learn from what everybody else is doing, but we also apply programs that are very unique to our own areas.
In my region, the Asia, Japan region, for example, if you look at cancer mortality rates, the reason why people die in my region is very different in many respects from what happens in the rest of the world.
Lung cancer is the biggest cause of mortality in the world, lung cancer in Asia actually is slightly different than the rest of the world because Asians have a mutation that occurs at high frequency; 40 percent of lung cancer patients have this mutation, only 3 percent of Westerners have it. But the implications of that is that some therapies which don’t work in Westerners are actually very, very good in Asians because they target this mutation.
So here we have a way in which we can, one therapy one works in Asians, it doesn’t work in Westerners. If we were going to be development only in Westerners, we will never be able to then find that these therapies are in fact effective for Asians.
The second cause of death from death from cancer in Asia is gastric cancer, and yet gastric cancers are a rare disease in the West. So it’s fascinating how, you know, the reasons for why people die are so different, and it’s interesting that it took us this long to figure out that we needed to look at the local patients for us to develop strategies that actually address their needs.
But I think, you know, with the competitiveness that exists now in the marketplace, companies that don’t do what we’re doing are going to have a harder time being successful.
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