Category Archives: Slovakia

Same Old Car Wars

Posted on by

A Wall Street Journal article about theft across the German-Polish border amused me today.  Not that theft is amusing, but their description of the illicit traffic of luxury cars and heavy equipment from west to east as a “new war” tickled my funny bone.  You see, this “trade” in stolen goods has been going on ever since the Berlin Wall collapsed, despite the claims of some that it started with the easing of border controls between Poland and Germany a couple years ago.

Hot property

I worked in Vienna in the late 1990s and tales of rampant car theft were common in the Austrian capital.  My office had a Plymouth Voyager minivan that I drove regularly across the border into Slovakia.  Turned out it wasn’t the only Voyager crossing that particular border.  My security officer cautioned me to always be careful where I parked, making sure it was in a secure location.  Voyagers were in demand, it seemed, by the Ukrainian mafia, which was using them as “troop carriers” back east.  In one two-week period, 25 Voyagers were stolen off the streets of Vienna and some were later spotted in Kiev.  A van belonging to the American ambassador in Austria was stolen after it was parked on the street in Bratislava.

It wasn’t just the Ukrainian mafia.  Bratislava in those days was divided into spheres of influence controlled by the local Slovak mafia and interlopers from the Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and Italy (and probably others I never heard about).  They each used a hotel in their part of the city as a headquarters and, if you parked in that hotel’s garage, you were pretty much assured protection.  Ironically, I think my van was usually protected by the Ukrainians.

Things worked differently if you had an expensive or rare personal vehicle.  I drove a BMW roadster in Austria and made an early decision never to drive it to the east, though I did make nervous exceptions for brief excursions into Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia.  The Albanian mafia was especially active in thefts of BMWs, Mercedes and the like, though the Poles did a good business in stolen cars to the north of us.  The local wags in Vienna swore that the official Albanian tourism slogan was: “Visit Albania.  Your car is waiting for you!”.  In fact, cars stolen from Austria and Italy could be found in huge impromptu “lots” on Albanian beaches and owners sometimes found their vehicles and bought them back.

Nope.  The stolen car trade is nothing new.

Sympathy for the Devil

Posted on by

“Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.”

- Keith Richards, Mick Jagger

Can’t think of an industry more loved and hated than Big Pharma.  We need, want, even love their products.  We hate to pay for them.  Some of us think we are “owed” Big Pharma’s products, and that governments should pay them for us.  Others think Big Pharma should give it away for free.  But, if they do, where will newer better drugs come from?  Conundrum.

The prevailing perception is that the Big Pharma companies are money-grubbing carnivorous capitalists who gleefully and willfully charge us all through the nose for their life-saving wonders.  The counter image is that their research labs are filled with wonderful caring people who are trying to save the world from disease.  The reality, of course, lies between these extremes.

IMS Health published a study Monday that declares that the major pharmaceutical companies are failing to enter and capture markets in the developing world.  The United States and Japan remain the two largest pharmaceutical markets in the world, but China is about to leap into third place.  And Brazil, Russia and India are right behind the Chinese.  Venezuela, Poland, Argentina, Turkey, Mexico, Vietnam, South Africa, Thailand, Indonesia, Romania, Egypt, Pakistan and the Ukraine are all becoming major pharma consumers.  But the point highlighted by IMS is that most of the major players in worldwide pharmaceuticals are missing the boat.  Some of the big European drug companies are in the game (Bayer, Nycomed, Sanofi-Aventis, Novartis, Novo Nordisk).  Of the big American firms, only Pfizer seems to have responded in a big way.

IMS prescribes a regime of (1) recognizing that these emerging markets (they dub them, unfortunately, “pharmerging markets”) are taking off, (2) doing your homework to understand the complexity of these markets, and (3) adapting strategies accordingly.  Good sound advice for any company with any product that is entering a new market.

Curiously, the IMS study does not look at why the big American companies have seemingly been caught napping.  Lip service is paid to hard times economically.  Something was said about venture capital drying up, though that wouldn’t impact the truly big companies.  Having worked with pharma companies, large and small, I suspect something else is at play.  My candidates concern how prices are set in many markets – and protection of small local pharma companies in many developing countries.

Which is the real Lipitor? (Source: Pfizer Inc.)

Many governments see pharmaceuticals as a flagship industry that must be developed for prestige as much as for health reasons.  Countries go through fads on this kind of thing.  In the 1960s, every country had to develop a steel industry, then they moved on to having their own national airlines.  National pharmaceutical champions became the norm in the 1990s and that continues today.  When I worked in Slovakia in the late 1990s, any company that wanted to sell a pharmaceutical in the Slovak market had to submit a complete description of the drug to the Slovak Government, including exhaustive detail on ingredients and manufacturing techniques.  For the “health and safety” of the Slovak citizen, of course.  Funny that these submissions were all kept safely in a vault inside the headquarters of Slovakia’s biggest pharmaceutical producer.  Amazing how quickly this Slovak company could churn out low-cost generic versions of the same drugs.  I wonder why Big Pharma stopped selling new drugs in Slovakia?

Pricing is the other big item.  Most countries exercise extreme control over pharmaceutical pricing, either directly or through their status as the sole insurer in the market.  Working in eastern Europe, I found that the normal pricing formula was to require the pharma company to reveal the three lowest prices for its drug worldwide, and to “accept” an average of those three as the maximum price in your country.  Now let’s see, we take the average of the three lowest prices out of 150 or so markets … I wonder why profit margins are dwindling?  Not only do such pricing practices cut the funds available for future research on new drugs, but there is incentive for the big companies to stay out of absurdly low price markets so that they can maintain some sort of reasonable profit margin for their shareholders.

But that’s filthy lucre.  I forgot, Big Pharma is supposed to give it away.  Guess I’ll sell that pharma stock.

Bratislava is Cruising

Posted on by

Bratislava – Bratislava’s old town is one of the best preserved in central Europe and is always a joy. Though the city is Slovakia’s capital, it is far smaller, say, than Prague or Budapest – and perhaps more accessible because of it. Like Budapest, Bratislava is not showing overt signs of recession, but my friends tell me that the smaller cities and the countryside are hurting. Indeed, there is impressive new construction in Bratislava’s Incheba neighborhood, where the trade show fairgrounds are located. I was told about ambitious plans to renovate the city’s Danube waterfront and that much of the riverbank will be covered with broad promenades and docking space for Danube cruise ships.

Bratislava Street Man

Bratislava Street Man

Corruption is still an issue in Slovakia, though I was relieved to hear that there seems to be less criminal activity than in years past. In the late 1990s there were gang wars between the Slovak, Ukrainian, Hungarian and Italian mafias. It was well known which mafias controlled which hotels or sections of Bratislava, but this is less clear today as the gangs have moved into more legitimate activities and are run on more businesslike lines.

There is an undeniable air of entrepreneurship in Slovakia, something that struck me fifteen years ago and, to my eye, is still evident today. At the time of the breakup, it seemed to me that the Slovaks were perhaps more ambitious than the Czechs, but the latter were starting their new country with more resources. I’ll be interested to see what has happened on the Czech side of the border.

But first, let’s check out some vineyards in Austria.