The demand for healthcare keeps on growing. People are living longer than ever before, populations are increasing and new markets, such as China, are fast emerging. And, despite the significant medical advances in recent decades, many diseases remain not well treated, or there is not yet an effective medicine. Continued innovation is vital to address these unmet needs.
At the same time, the coming years represent an unprecedented challenge for the pharmaceutical industry and for AstraZeneca. We face patent expiries on major products, ever higher hurdles for R&D productivity and increasing pressure on pricing and access.
To make sure that AstraZeneca is well positioned to manage the challenges – and the opportunities - that lie ahead, we are re-shaping and strengthening some aspects of our business. Our overall strategy remains the same.
We will not do different things, but we will do some things differently to strengthen further our ability to provide medicines that bring benefit for patients and add value for our stakeholders and society.
We are transforming our R&D to leverage the best of what we have and building the capabilities that we need for world-class performance. We will grow our business by further increasing our presence in emerging markets - strengthening our sales and marketing capability alongside capital investment in new facilities. We are boosting our efforts to source innovation from outside AstraZeneca’s walls and working in partnerships throughout the value chain that broaden the base for success. Across all these areas, we continue to drive efficiency and effectiveness, including increased outsourcing to a diverse range of strategic suppliers.
Our work to implement these initiatives and drive future success is underpinned by our commitment to delivering that success responsibly. The trust and confidence of our stakeholders depend on it.
Backed by the strengthened governance and management frameworks we have put in place in recent years, we continue to drive the integration of responsible business thinking across all our business activity and decision-making. A particular focus for 2009 was reinforcing personal accountability for compliance with our new Code of conduct and Global Policies through training and monitoring of business practices. As part of this, we introduced a combined CR and compliance ‘responsible business’ scorecard with defined objectives and accountabilities to track performance consistently across all aspects of our business. Importantly, the scorecard has enabled quarterly performance reporting to the Senior Executive Team, the Audit Committee and Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, as well as annual reporting to the Board.
We have made some good progress, but there will always be more to learn about what our CR commitments mean in practice and how we can further improve our performance.
To stay in touch with the changing expectations of a responsible business, we actively engage with stakeholders to understand their perspectives and to hear about what they think we are doing well or where further work may be needed. External benchmarking, such as the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, and our internal Global Employee Survey are other important means of evaluating our performance.
We use the insight gained from these activities to inform the development of our CR agenda and action planning. Key themes of the recent feedback included access to medicines, human rights, the supply chain, increased transparency on key business practices and greater clarity on our CR strategy. Over the last twelve months, among other things, we have expanded public information on patient safety, clinical trials and sales and marketing practices; appointed a new Global Diversity Leader; launched and begun implementation of a global Responsible Procurement Standard, and signed up to the UN Global Compact to reinforce our commitment to responsible business.
During the year, our drive to improve efficiency and effectiveness across AstraZeneca resulted in further reductions in our workforce. The executive team and I remain committed to ensuring that we manage these changes in line with our core values and that we deal responsibly and sympathetically with affected individuals and the communities in which they live. You can find our more about this in the our employees section.
Looking ahead, we are in the process of developing a new responsible business strategy.
Building on the introduction of our new responsible business scorecard for internal performance tracking, the new strategy will continue to focus on the material issues facing AstraZeneca. In the light of the changes to our business described above, and the feedback from our stakeholders, we will be particularly looking at the areas of access to medicines, R&D ethics, sales and marketing practice, human rights and the supply chain. The strategy will be introduced in 2010, backed by a revised and strengthened Action Plan that will include longer term objectives and performance measures.
I want AstraZeneca to be valued both as a source of great medicines and as a company committed to delivering business success responsibly.
As we navigate our business through the challenging times ahead, I am determined that we will not lose sight of this goal and that we will continue to build on the progress we have made to deliver enduring value for our stakeholders through what we do and how we do it.
D R Brennan
Chief Executive Officer
