Many people living in Thailand know Betadine as ya daeng or "red medicine", but few know much about the company behind this popular medicine that millions of parents apply to their children's frequent cuts and scrapes.
The company that makes the rusty-red povidone-iodine found in countless medicine cabinets is known as Mundipharma. It's not a household name like many other giant global pharmaceutical concerns, but it is their equal when it comes to influence in many aspects of the industry.
There's a Thailand connection as well, as I learned when I interviewed Mundipharma CEO Raman Singh recently. It turned out the pharmaceutical executive sitting in front of me used to take the same bus that I caught when I was studying in Rangsit, in the northern suburbs of Bangkok, some years ago. He too was a student here.
"I would not change a thing in my life and those years in Thailand were probably the hardest years in my life, but at that point it was the right thing to do, and it really shaped me as an individual," Mr Singh recalled of his time as an MBA student and subsequent early career in Thailand.
One might expect the head of a pharmaceutical company to also have some kind of academic background in medicine or a related field, but Mr Singh chose engineering as his undergraduate degree though medicine and saving lives have always been close to his heart.
"Engineering, in the same way, taught me a lot of things whether it be analytic capability, to analyse and solve a problem, as it is not always about just the goal, it is the whole process that helps you become an engineer," he explained.
Today Mr Singh oversees the operations of a diversified healthcare company that focuses on both consumer health and pharmaceutical products. Since joining Mundipharma in 2011, he has helped to vastly expand its operations, increased the number of employees from 350 to more than 10,000, and achieved 18 consecutive quarters of growth. The value of its business in emerging Asia has increased from US$65 million in 2011 to over $700 million today.
"We have expanded 10 times in this region and for the company, emerging markets have been quite a catalyst for growth. The US has been quite stagnant and Europe has been growing in the lower single digits but the region that we are talking about has been growing north of 40% over the last six years," he told Asia Focus.
Mundipharma was founded in Switzerland in 1957 but is now headquartered in New York as one of the largest privately held healthcare companies in the world. It is structured as a network of independent associated companies with a corporate presence in 51 countries and sales in dozens more. Each company is responsible for commercialising and launching products within its own market.
The Mundipharma product range is one of the broadest in the industry and includes everything from cold remedies and antiseptic sprays to respiratory products, anti-inflammatory drugs and oncology treatments. One of its affiliates, Purdue, is the developer of oxycodone, the drug at the heart of the troubling opioid addiction epidemic in the United States. While oxycodone usage is declining in the US, Mundipharma has been marketing the medication aggressively in other countries, the Los Angeles Times reported in December. The company defends its approach and says it continues to improve and make OxyContin safer, with anti-abuse properties.
In 1991, Mundipharma opened its first Asian operation in Japan and three years later it founded a regional office in Singapore. In the pipeline is a plan to build the first global hub for pharmaceutical products in Asia after its May 2016 announcement that it would invest up to $100 million to set up the Betadine Consumer Health Hub combining research and development, manufacturing and distribution in Singapore.
"We have set up Singapore as the base for emerging markets and over the last six years it has become the global base for consumer health. The plan is to make it into a worldwide headquarters for the consumer health business, from a manufacturing, development and commercial standpoint," said Mr Singh.
"The growth story for the emerging markets has been transformational for the company. Until about 2011 it was primarily a US or developed Europe-dominated company, but we have significantly transformed the organisation in terms of the geographic footprint where we have moved from five countries to the 128 that we currently operate our sales in."
The process of portfolio diversification has been both organic and inorganic. It has included more than 40 acquisitions in the past six years and the launches of its own medicines and products that have not been launched in this part of the world before. For example, Mundipharma is looking to introduce the entire range of its Betadine products, which include wound care, feminine care, throat and oral care and infectious disease categories, to Thailand in the near future.
"Asia accounts for 70% of the emerging economies while two-thirds of the global population lies in this part of the world," said Mr Singh. "The biggest unmet need is still in Asia which is due to access and low incomes, and there is still a lot of potential. If you have the right products, priced the right way, and you have a good network, you can still see a huge upside for the business.
"This part of the world continues to grow north of 10% even as the pharmaceutical or healthcare sector is growing in the low single digits, if at all, in the US and in Europe."
THE THAI YEARS
Before joining Mundipharma, Mr Singh was working in London as a vice-president of commercial operations for emerging markets at GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company. He also held positions with the US healthcare company Abbott as its regional director in Australia and New Zealand.
But people still ask, what was an Indian-born Californian doing in Thailand before his years with large Western companies?
"I have been in healthcare since 1992 and the first job that I got was by accident where I started my career with Bayer, then to Abbott and then to GSK before moving into Singapore," he explained.
"I did my undergrad degree in engineering and when you graduate from university, you really don't pick an industry, the industry actually picks you," he said, reflecting on how his career has turned out.
He believes that people have very different ambitions and are quite short-term in their thinking when they have just graduated from university, and it would be rare to find someone that age who is thinking 25 years ahead. He was among those who was unsure of what he really wanted to do.
In the early 1990s, the internet was just starting to have an impact, and within a few years the dot-com boom was luring countless new graduates to the San Francisco Bay area for a brief gold rush. Mr Singh, however, opted to start in a place most of his American peers couldn't find on a map. He moved to Ayutthaya, 85 kilometres north of Thailand's capital, instead.
"My first job was in Ayutthaya, and then I moved to Bangkok where I did my MBA at Assumption University which at that time was the only English-speaking MBA school other than the Asian Institute of Management which was in Rangsit, while Abac was on Ramkhamhaeng Road," he said.
"I was living in Ayutthaya and I used to travel almost every day to Bangkok and back, which was about three hours to come in and three hours to go back. Because of my financial circumstances, I was not driving and I still remember that I had to take a bus, a train and then a motorcycle but it was the most amazing period of my life, because it made me turn from a boy to become a man."
He chose Thailand because of the excitement of being able to work in the Far East. After working for a while as an engineer with the local unit of Ansell, a maker of medical and industrial gloves and protective clothing, he moved to Bayer Thailand. He stayed with the pharmaceutical multinational for five years before going back to the United States to obtain another MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix, Arizona.
After completing his degree, he rejoined Bayer in Cambodia to help set up its operations there before the company transferred him to Singapore, followed by a stint in Germany and then back to the States to work at the biologics division at Research Triangle Park, one of the world's largest research parks, in North Carolina.
Mr Singh stayed with Bayer for another six productive years before being approached by Abbott from Chicago to join its global HIV business. He returned to Asia, this time to Seoul, before being moved to Sydney, where GSK approached him to manage its commercial operations for emerging markets before he moved on to London.
ASIA BASE
The experience and insights Mr Singh gained in Asia stood him in good stead when Mundipharma approached him in 2011. "Before that I was managing emerging economies for GlaxoSmithKline from London but what Mundipharma wanted to do back then is to consolidate Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Singapore into one hub … and because China was a big driver I wanted to be closer to China which, at that point, constituted almost 80% of our overall [emerging market] sales, though today it is less than 50%," he said.
"We were still, literally, just scratching the tip of the surface and we really wanted to expand in China. There was the option of two countries, either Hong Kong or Singapore. We considered both but Singapore won out for a wide variety of reasons including a business-friendly environment, a hub for innovation, an ecosystem with universities, great hospitals, infrastructure and talent pool."
It soon became clear that a manufacturing plant was needed in the region as well because demand for Betadine was outstripping supply in the region.
"Nobody expected it to have the uptake it did and pretty soon we realised 70% of our global volume was coming from Asia and would continue to come from Asia, so then we had to consider the fact that the manufacturing plant would be in Asia," he said.
Once the decision to build a plant in Asia was made, it came down to a choice between Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. Because the plant is highly automated, the company opted for Singapore.
"If it was labour-intensive we would have not have opted for Singapore and the county would have been less likely to give land because it is very selective. … The government has of course provided a lot of incentives in terms of taxes and training to individuals in order to make sure that innovation comes into the country, and they have been pretty smart in that," said Mr Singh.
Thailand is now beginning to adopt a similar model to attract investment as it looks to move up the value chain, especially in fields such as healthcare. Given the enhanced incentives, "Thailand will definitely be one of the countries that we would look into" in the future, he said.
It's been a long journey for the one-time engineering undergrad, but Mr Singh has no regrets about choosing the pharmaceutical business, given the opportunities it has provided to travel and learn.
"I have been very fortunate that the career accident happened but I never changed my industry after that even if I had options to go into many other different industries. It's like what sports people always say, that if you love what you do, you will never 'work' again," he said.
"The fact that you are able to change the lives of people, the fact that there is a bigger meaning in what you do, the fact that you can impact families, and you can actually make a difference, it is a huge factor and a huge motivation. If you asked most pharmaceutical or healthcare executives, somewhere down the line, that is a huge driver for them. There is also the money, but this side of it cannot be overcome.
"To be able to tell my two children that I am working in the healthcare industry, they relate to it a lot more, whereas in my generation it was very little. Over the years, I have realised that having a bigger meaning to what you do is huge and I think, especially for me, that is a huge motivator."
