Reflecting on his career journey thus far, Prathaban Mylvaganam, Deputy Chairman / Group CEO, of Emerchemie NB (Pvt) Ltd. enlightens us on some of the challenges he faced, how he navigated through such challenges and gives us his outlook on the future of the pharmaceutical industry.
Hailing from humble beginnings in the hillside town of Nawalapitiya where his father owned a small textile shop, Prathaban enjoyed a modest lifestyle that was happy and peaceful until the communal riots erupted in 1983 and the whole family was forced to flee to India as refugees and adapt to a foreign country and a completely different style of living. Once things settled down, they came back, and his father had to start again from scratch.
Through a lot of hard work Prathaban was fortunate enough to place highly on the grade 5 scholarship exam which gave him the opportunity to attend one of the most prestigious schools in the country Royal College Colombo, which initially came as quite a culture shock. He had to adapt not only to a new school but also a new society and new customs as well and tough as it was, this particular tenure laid the foundations for his ambitions as he had a glimpse into life led by the elite society of Colombo.
“My life has been one of adaptation. Every few years in my life I have had to face challenges not only personally but as a member of a larger society as well. How I have faced and lived with those challenges has defined my life.”
After finishing up his school studies Prathaban then moved back to India for his higher education and successfully earned a degree in microbiology. This set him on the path of science, and he was eager to pursue a career in science and took the first steps by working in a pathological laboratory. This was another adaptation in his life that bestowed a set of different experiences of dealing with people of various cultures which he greatly attributes the growth of his leadership skills to.
When he returned to Colombo, he had almost no problem securing a sought-after position as Product Specialist at A. Baur’s Limited, one of the leading pharmaceutical importers in the country. However, his attention was soon caught by a rapidly developing newcomer in the field named Emerchemie and he applied to join them as a product specialist in the Oncological field. At that time Emerchemie was a fledgling company that was already making waves.
His story from then up to now is inextricably intertwined with this company over the last 20 years. He was privileged enough to be taken under the wing of Mr. Nimal Dias Jayasinha, the founder and Chairman of Emerchemie, who groomed him personally, taught him the intricacies of marketing which he managed to enhance by acquiring an MBA as well. He has a huge amount of gratitude for this and mentions “NDJ as he is popularly known, was and still is mentor, friend, and counsellor to me as I rose through the ranks of this remarkable company. It is solely due to his influence and benevolence that a boy from the backwaters of Nawalapitiya is today the Deputy Chairman and Group CEO of Emerchemie NB, one of the leading pharmaceutical agency houses in the country.”
Asked about his own family, he said that he is married to a lady doctor, working in the state sector and is the father of two boys who attend his own alma mater. “A stable and happy family is the ideal home base for a flourishing career” was his view of his family life.
When asked about the philosophy and the culture at Emerchemie, he responds saying “I firmly believe that the philosophy of any leader or the company that they represent should focus on the wellbeing of its employees. This outlook of benevolence, if it comes from the leader, tends to be reflected in the outlook of the company. These are values ingrained in me by my parents who even during the time of their greatest hardship, sought to reflect on the goodness of the people who helped us during the bad times rather than on the actions of those who opposed us. Fortunately, Emerchemie has been imbibed with this philosophy by the Chairman himself and all I had to do was to build on that foundation.
Everyone in the corporate world has a tendency to judge success and growth by numbers. If a company with a turnover of a billion rupees records a turnover of 1.5 billion within a short period of time, it is considered a roaring success. In my opinion it is merely growth and not success. Nobody pays attention to the personal growth of the employees who were instrumental in achieving that growth. My personal philosophy and that of Emerchemie as a whole is to ensure the happiness and Job-satisfaction of our people. When your people gradually achieve their personal ambitions, they tend to be inspired to achieve more and to work together in order to develop their place of work. This leads to organic growth of the company built upon each individual as well as the cumulative success of its employees.
What exhibits this philosophy best is the fact that at Emerchemie, every single member of the senior management is a home-grown talent, having worked more than a decade in the company. Their personal achievements and their loyalty have been appropriately rewarded by the company which in turn has resulted in their complete loyalty to our development and growth. They in turn have become role models to the next line of leaders who aspire to be even better.”
Pharmaceuticals are an essential part of people’s lives. Instead of trends it has changes brought about by new research, new discoveries, and the resultant changes in the prescriptions of doctors. Since the industry is linked intimately to the practices of the medical fraternity, there is a constant need to adapt to the new advances and rethink the old strategies based upon the new knowledge that comes from myriad research programs going on around the world.
If you look at the world in general, compliance and adherence to high ethical standards is the most important recent development. It has become the focal point in both the pharmaceutical industry as well as in the entire medical field. Now all aspects of the industry as well as the interaction with the medical fraternity has to be compliant to the highest international ethical standards. Since Emerchemie markets products imported from the leading pharmaceutical manufacturers in the world, it has become imperative for us to follow the same standards.
Since we are a patient-oriented company it is our foremost duty to ensure the quality of our products. That is why we adhere to the newest and most advanced trends in storage, transport, temperature monitoring, and cold chain maintenance so that our patients get the benefit of all modern aspects and trends in quality assurance.
In addition, Pharmacovigilance or the following up of products for their adverse effects in the patient population, which has hitherto been solely under the purview of the State Health system, has now become more relevant to private sector companies as manufacturers insist on getting pharmacovigilance data from the patients in all countries. This has led us to educate our field staff on this aspect of pharmaceutical marketing and gear them towards gathering pharmacovigilance data from the society.
Talking about the future and expansion of the company Prathaban explained that the current economic situation has made it obvious that any great future expansion depends on acquiring a stake in the expanding local manufacturing segment of pharmaceuticals. The current fiscal constraints make importing more and more difficult and convoluted. Fortunately, Emerchemie had diversified into local manufacturing long before this crisis by forming Emergen Lifesciences, their own manufacturing company which now manufactures dry powder inhalation medicines to both the state and the private sectors. In addition to that, they have started collaborating with other leading local manufacturers in order to market their products in Sri Lanka.
As for brand expansion, he mentions that “we concentrate solely on enhancing the names of our manufacturers and building their brands rather than expanding the brand of Emerchemie. So much so that we joke about Emerchemie being the largest company in the country whose name no one is aware of!”
Although the journey has been a major success so far, currently our industry is facing so many challenges at the same time that I sometimes wonder whether we have been singled out for some special torture. While the foreign exchange crisis, logistic problems brought about by the pandemic and the exodus of trained personnel is common to all industries, there are some that are unique to the pharmaceutical sector.
For instance, many of our products are price controlled and the rest of them are price regulated. This is unbearable in an atmosphere where the landing cost of all medicines has increased due to exchange fluctuation, increase in API prices, and rising freight charges. Our industry is governed by a regulatory authority where bottlenecks and bureaucratic red tape makes registration of pharmaceuticals and the subsequent renewal of such registration a nightmare. All pharmaceutical companies have a share of their business with the state health sector, supplying medicines to the government hospitals. Although we kept up our supplies regularly, even at the height of the pandemic, the payment for such supplies has not been forthcoming with the same regularity. This situation has deteriorated in the recent months with the result that we have run up huge amounts in unpaid bills from the state health sector. The situation is so catastrophic that this burden is about to make some importers go into liquidation.
While this industry has a long record of supplying high quality medicines to our patients at a reasonable price, as evidenced by our excellent health indicators and the comparatively low prices in the market, the public perception of our industry is extremely poor. Encouraged by some biased and unscrupulous reporting by a segment of organised media and also by some social media activists, the public has looked down upon us as the ‘’Pharma mafia’’. A term that I detest and is wholly unjustified. Only people like us who have been at the epicentre of the social and economic earthquake of recent times and yet have been compelled to keep on working in order ensure the health of our people, would know the sacrifices made by the people in our industry during the past three years.
I know that solutions to our problems do not rest solely in our hands. We as a nation need to change the entire outlook that we have towards politics, race, religion, and all other social divisions that we have embraced in the past and work towards economic salvation together. We, for our part, will continue to function as we have always done with the good health of our people being paramount in our minds.
Despite all of this, Prathaban is quite positive about the future and remarks that the industry will look towards a year of consolidation rather than of growth in the coming year. I am currently the senior vice president of the Sri Lanka Chamber of Pharmaceutical Industry, which is the umbrella organisation of all pharmaceutical importers and as an industry we will work on implementing a fair and transparent pricing mechanism for pharmaceuticals that will not only consolidate the position of the industry but also enable our patients to get their medicines regularly without interruptions and at a fair price. We hope that this will help change the perception of the population towards our industry.
We need to devise a way of stopping the drain of our best people to other countries by offering them a more stable economic environment, which unfortunately our industry will not be able to do on our own. However, I am optimistic for the rest of this new year, and I feel that both Emerchemie and the pharmaceutical Industry will not only survive but grow to be stronger at the end of the year.
From our point of view, the future raises the concern of patients being unable to afford high-quality medicines due to financial constraints. Any patient centric pharmaceutical company has to follow a path, where making products accessible and affordable should take precedence over mere profits in order to survive in the future. After all, good health is the only true wealth.