Imagine: you are a company that sells a drug to help people to stop smoking. All of sudden you receive an immense demand for your product. Sounds absolutely perfect. Sounds like a dream. Well, according to “In Japan, Pfizer is Short of Drug to Help Smokers” by Hiroko Tabuchi, this was Pfizer’s reality. Japan was a smoker friendly environment. People could smoke anywhere and paid low prices. October 1 the government raised cigarette taxes as a move to get people to quit. It worked.
Smokers wanting to quit rushed to doctors requesting Pfizer’s Chantix (or Champix in Japan), which aids smokers to quit smoking. Although Pfizer knew about the tax increase a year before its arrival, the company did not prepare for the great demand. According to Tabuchi “less than two weeks after the tax increase…the company was forced to suspend sales of the drug”. Pfizer has stated they will have some products to sale this month.
Pfizer was given an opportunity to live out any company’s dream: high demand and a year to prepare for this demand. While I can’t say the company did nothing, doctors, smokers wanting to quit and the Japanese government are probably saying so about the company. According to the article, Chantix was very popular in Japan before the tax increase, thus it can’t be said that Pfizer didn’t know their product was already well known and accepted. This is a great failure for the company. Not due to an inability to satisfy demand but because they had a year to prepare and produce, in a market where they were already accepted, and still failed to live up to demand. As Tabuchi put it, “Pfizer has given up millions of dollars in potential Chantix sales”. “Given up” are the perfect words to describe this blunder.
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