Astrazeneca and Csr

In this essay I am going to look at AstraZeneca PLC one of the world’s top pharmaceutical companies. By describing several relevant cases and commenting on them I will try to evaluate the extent to which the Company acts under the principles framing its corporate governance and corporate social responsibility policies.

To give brief overview, AstraZeneca PLC, formed on April 6, 1999, by the merger of British Zeneca Group PLC and Swedish Astra AB, is one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world. It is well illustrated by some key facts listed on the Company’s website:

“Our products are available in over 100 countries; sales in 2005 totalled $24 billion, with an operating profit of $6.5 billion; we spend over $14 million every working day on the research and development of new medicines that meet patient needs (total R&D spend in 2005: $3.4 billion); we employ around 12,000 people in research and development at 11 R&D centres in seven countries: Sweden, the UK, the US, Canada, France, India and Japan; we have some 14,000 people at 27 manufacturing sites in 19 countries, in total, we employ over 65,000 people worldwide: 58% in Europe, 28% in the Americas and 14% in the rest of the world” (AstraZeneca, 2006).

As AstraZeneca make more than 97% of its sales in prescription pharmaceutical sector, naturally, the Company’s main activities are discovering, developing, manufacturing and marketing those medicines for various areas of healthcare; to cite several examples, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, neuroscience, oncology, infection, respiratory and inflammation. The best-selling AstraZeneca’s products include Arimidex, Crestor, Nexium, Seroquel and Symbicort. Due to the Company’s specialisation in prescription pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca’s marketing activities are mainly aimed at physicians (both primary care and specialist) and other health care specialists. (NYSE Group, 2006)

It is a fact that if the corporation is large, it is bound to

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