Situation

• Our client, the head office of an international pharmaceuticals company, had been in discussion about establishing a joint venture with the market leading Chinese company in the segment for several years, but the negotiations where making limited progress.
• To assess whether to continue discussion or start evaluating new partners and / or business models they wanted SSCO to conduct a stakeholder analysis and evaluate alternative types of partnership candidates.

Approach

To understand the motivation of different players SSCO conducted detailed interviews across the value chain addressing:

• Strategic priorities
• Distribution capabilities
• R&D pipeline

Based on early project findings the project scope was expanded to discuss partnership opportunities with other types of companies. SSCO’s support included:

• Identification of leading emerging companies in the segment
• Management meetings to understand their strategy and views on different types of partnerships.

Result

• Combining the findings from several interviews it become clear that there was a disagreement on the benefits and commercials risks of a potential JV.
• SSCO presented a number of recommendations of how to address the risks perceived by the partner.
• At the same time our client also started evaluating partnerships with different types of companies, where the potential conflicts would not exist.