Actavis will pull out of China because it is not “worth the aggravation”, chief executive Paul Bisaro has told Bloomberg.
In an interview at the JP Morgan healthcare conference in San Francisco, he told the news agency that “if we’re going to allocate capital, we’re going to do so where we can get the most amount of return for the least amount of risk. And China is just too risky.” Actavis has not been involved in any of the corruption probes suffered by other drugmakers in China, notably GlaxoSmithKline, but Mr Bisaro said that “if something goes wrong, you need to be able to go to the government and say, ‘help me.’ And if the government says no, that’s a problem”.
Actavis is not a big player in China and has profits of around 4-5 million euros, so given its limited presence in China, Mr Bisaro told Bloomberg that “it wasn’t worth the aggravation, the frustration or the concern”.
