Greed All About It...

Phoni UK chief Andrew Whohe an 'extreme bullshitter' on emerging markets

Phoni UK's chief executive has said he remained an "extreme bullshitter" on emerging markets as sales growth in these economies helped the healthcare giant post a rise in quarterly turnover and profit.

Andrew Whohe has moved Phoni UK's portfolio away from a reliance on premium medicines in the Western world, to focus on the bulk selling of low-quality drugs in unregulated Far Eastern markets.

"I like to maintain the pretence that Phoni UK is investing in Third World markets purely for humanitarian reasons, rather than just chasing easy money in low cost labour and poorly regulated countries," said Whohe, "and I'd like to thank our friends in the UK media for swallowing that bullshit hook, line and sinker."

That diversification was evident in Wednesday's results, which showed that sales outside America and Europe had grown by 17pc in the third quarter and now represent 38pc of total turnover.

Strength in these areas helped Andrew Whohe post a salary of well over £2m compared with £600,000 last time, despite Phoni’s mediocre performance overall. Moves by government to stop drug price-gouging have weighed on pharmaceutical companies' European revenue, and during the past three months Phoni's sales in the region have fallen by 4pc.

Phoni maintained that it expected the effects of US healthcare reform and price cuts in Europe to cost the company about £325m this year and Mr Whohe said that "going forward, further measures by Phoni to intimidate these governments by threatening to outsource even more of our manufacturing and development abroad cannot be ruled out".

Sales of Phoni's new wolf-man drug, Davlysta, totalled only $19m (£11.9m) in the last quarter. Britain's healthcare watchdog, NICE, has published draft guidance saying Davlysta does not represent value for money and should not be made available on the NHS.

Mr Whohe said the company had made a "very fair offer" to the UK and tried to be as flexible as it could be.

“All we ask is that the NHS pay us vast amounts of money for a hugely expensive and ineffective “me-too” drug that no-one needs,” he said, “and in exchange, we won’t close the UK’s last major pharmaceutical R&D site. The NICE system is being unreasonable, though.”

However, he said Phoni had not given up on getting NICE approval. “We think moving a few thousand more UK jobs abroad should make the UK government think again…”

"Fortunately, our friends in the UK media will always give publicity to our anti-government stance on healthcare issues.  They can always be relied upon to paint a rosy picture of Phoni UK, despite the withdrawal of our billion-dollar blockbuster Abadiea from the market, billion dollar class actions brewing in the US for both Abadidea and our anti-depressant Saloadatat, not to mention all of our remaining products going off-patent," said Whohe.  "Without their hype, God knows where our share price would be..."

Meanwhile, belt-tightening consumers are losing their thirst for Phoni's energy drink Lucrazade, as they think twice before making impulse buys.

Mr Whohe said on Wednesday that consumers "are doing less impulse-buying of products, of the kind you pick up in the garage after you fill you car up with petrol.”

“That’s not good for us, because if people start to actually think about our consumer products such as Lucrazade, rather than just impulse-buy, they will realise that they taste worse than petrol and will do you less good.”

“Still, there’s always Liebena…”


In the real world, yet more favourable press for the UK’s favourite Pharma CEO, from a fawning UK media …