Engaging Our Stakeholders
- Michael Roberts, a pharmaceutical representative in Youngstown, Ohio meets with a physician. Physicians are some of Abbott's most important stakeholders.
We engage with a wide range of stakeholders, including employees, customers, suppliers, physicians, patients, investors, health care providers, policymakers, regulators, scientists, governments, nongovernmental organizations and UN agencies.
Abbott has a stake in many global issues, particularly those related to expanding access to health care. Our greatest responsibility and opportunity as a health care company is to create and make our products and technologies widely available. We are proud of our progress on priority issues, and recognize that more work lies ahead.
Because citizenship is an ongoing journey, challenges and opportunities arise each year, requiring us to reexamine our strategies, redouble our commitment and continually reevaluate what it means to be a responsible corporate citizen. We listen to the views of our stakeholders, seek to find common ground and hold true to our own values. Sometimes we respectfully disagree with others, in which case we aim to be clear and transparent about our positions.
For example, in 2007, the government of Thailand seized the patent for our HIV medicine, Kaletra. Despite our efforts to find common ground with the government, a mutually acceptable outcome was not achieved. Nevertheless, Kaletra remains widely available in Thailand. Abbott withdrew filing of a new formulation of Kaletra and other medicines. For us, this is about more than the immediate incident. It is about the future of new discoveries to treat many diseases, which relies upon respect for the intellectual property framework. This framework assures innovators that their inventions will be respected, while at the same time providing patients with access. Our actions were intended to protect current and future patients everywhere so that they will continue to have access to new medicines.
Through discussions with the government of Brazil, we came to an agreement on a price for Kaletra. As a low middle-income country (according to the World Bank), Brazil became eligible for the reduced price of $1,000 per patient per year when we introduced a tiered pricing system. This agreement exemplifies what can be achieved when both parties negotiate with patients in mind.
Engagement
of Business & Industry Organizations 
