Merck Case Study (Strategic Seminar)

Merck Case

Mission Statement: The mission of Merck is to provide society with superior products and services by developing innovations and solutions that improve the quality of life and satisfy customer needs, and to provide employees with meaningful work and advancement opportunities, and investors with a superior rate of return.

Executive Summary:Introduction and BackgroundMerck & Co., Inc. (“the Company”) is one of the largest companies within the pharmaceutical industry. It was founded in 1891 by George Merck and became public as of May 1946 trading on both the New York and Philadelphia Stock Exchanges. Currently, it has over 70,000 employees in 120 countries and 31 factories worldwide. As of 2006, it was ranked 9th with sales around $22,636 million compared to $22,012 million in 2005. Merck’s primary line of business is to discover, develop, manufacture, and market a wide array of products to help improve the health and length of survival for both humans and animals worldwide. The company is research driven and spends millions of dollars on research and development related expenditures. For example, it spent around $4,783 and $3,848 million in both 2006 and 2005, respectively for research and development (R&D). Within the industry, it is very important for companies to spend vast amounts of capital on R&D to develop new vaccines and medicines that will help humans with particular diseases, cancer, and other life/non-life threatening illnesses.

Merck’s core focus is “…to try never to forget that medicine is for the people [and]…not for the profits. The profits follow, and if…remembered they have never failed to appear.” The company lives by these words expressed by their founder and aligns them within all of its disciplines. For example, after the development and successful approval of one of its medicines Mectizan that treats onchocerciasis (river blindness), it started to donate it globally, especially in areas of Central and South America and...