GSK's Bribery Scandal in China: A Study

Background
GlaxoSmithKline(GSK) is a British pharmaceutical company headquartered in London, and also one of the leading drug manufacturing companies in the world. It is known for developing drugs and medicines for treating major diseases like cancer, diabetes, asthma, digestive diseases and mental health etc. It has around ten thousand employees worldwide. It has been developing its pharmaceutical business rapidly all over the world. China has been one of the main focus developing target market during the past years. Although GSK has made a huge success in making profit in entering the China market,

GSK was found guilty of the bribery criminals by the China government in 2014. China authorities sued GSK for bribing both doctors and hospitals

Although GSK's competitors may not allege any bribery as what GSK did, the reputation of other competitors and the whole drug industry could be ruined and damaged by GSK's scandal. The sales of the entire industry will drop as consumers need a long time to restore confidence. Since GSK gained comparative advantages with unfair competition practices, other competitors would relatively lose their competitiveness at the same time. Many small-in-scale pharmaceutical firms might close down because of the tight competition. At last, Chinese consumers

In the case of GSK, they violated the laws for corrupting the doctors, hospital and even government executives and selling the drugs at an unreasonable high price. GSK is responsible for these illegal and unethical decisions. GSK violated utilitarianism since they didn't raise overall happiness within all the stakeholders, instead they only concerned about their own happiness of the business, which was about making money. The happiness of the patients and customers were slashed because they were misled to spend more money buying their medication at an unreasonable price and for conditions, it was never designed to treat. Moreover, consumers and patients had to face the potential risk of life-threatening danger or having side effects if they mistake drugs or medication with unrealistic and exaggerate effects. I think Although GSK has some very specific internal regulations against corruption, these so-called rules seem to be readily circumvented or even ignored. Therefore, GSK is necessary to establish an independent department－Office of Business Ethics and Integrity which are responsible for all the anti-corruption and fraud investigation throughout the company and be directly accountable to the Chief Executive Officer and the Board, like the ICAC in Hong Kong. This act can avoid any intervention, cheating, and fraud by the regional executives and managers. The