Authorities in China say that GlaxoSmithKline’s Chinese subsidiary paid bribes on a massive scale and that the orders to do so came from management. Investors don’t care. GSK shares did nothing in response to the news.
Partly, this is an old story. The investigation surfaced last summer. It had an immediate impact then – drug sales in China fell 60 per cent in the third quarter (they have recovered since, perhaps because of vaccine sales, which are less sensitive to quick decisions of prescribers than pills or inhalers). So the bad news may already be in the share price.
Or maybe investors have concluded that sales in China just aren’t that important. At about $700m, Chinese pharma sales were just 3 per cent of the group total in 2012. More likely, investors struggle to estimate how important China is because the disclosures are so thin. The Chinese revenue number takes a bit of work to find and GSK does not disclose Chinese profits.