Alex Jensen: You’re listening to Koreabizcast with the KBLA. I’m Alex Jensen, and it’s Tuesday, October 26^th, which means we’re just days away from a gradual return to normal life, according to President Moon Jae-in yesterday. But even after November arrives, some things we just have to remain used to, like wearing masks in public, a few companies will have made a fortune producing such pandemic accessories and that’s not all COVID-19 has created a multibillion-dollar market for vaccines. And the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries generally have gone through a remarkable period of disruption. We’ll get a leading insight on that, on today’s episode, which is brought to you by the Four Seasons Hotel Seoul, stylish elegance in the very heart of the city.

Alex Jensen: So then, without further ado, let’s welcome Erwan Vilfeu, the president of Zuellig Pharma Korea. It’s great to have you with us. Thank you.

Erwan Vilfeu: Hi, likes very nice to be on the call with you today. Thank you.

Alex Jensen: And I had hoped to speak to you a little bit earlier. But when we connected yesterday, in the late morning. I was struck by this massive connection disruption around the country apparently was a massive hacking attack on KT, the major South Korean telecom operator. And it happened for around an hour, various different disruptions that affected my phone. It affected my internet, but I understand you were actually okay. And your company was also okay yesterday, is that correct?

Erwan Vilfeu: I was fine I was surprised communication was cut, which is something which is not happening in Korea

Alex Jensen: Exactly. Right.

Erwan Vilfeu: Run into very efficient systems.

Alex Jensen: I mean, if nothing else, it taught me about overreliance on the internet, but I don’t know how else we do this podcast. Something to think about for the future. I mean, we’ve got the opportunity here to talk to you not only about the pharmaceutical industry, but also, I think to find out more about you, which seems particularly worthy considering your transition in leadership, between continents and between large companies. Can you just give us first an overview of that journey?

Erwan Vilfeu: Well, I just landed in Korea. That’s 7 years ago now. Before that, I worked, lived in mostly all continents, whole countries around the world. First, as a child with my parents grew up between France, Southern America, Middle East, Northern America, then I started to work with Nestle 20 years ago, and when all around as well was in Africa before being in Korea, and before that in Europe, United States as well. So, too many I mean, a lot of countries, a lot of different, nice places, different cultures. And the Korea was for me, my first country in Asia, fantastic discovery, where I landed as market head for Nestle. And after 3 years, when Nestle asked me to come back to Switzerland, I fought I still had a lot to discover in Korea and decided to quit Nestle and move to a different company, which is the one I’m managing now, which is called Zuellig Pharma.

Alex Jensen: Well, I want to come back to that and find out what it was about Korea that kept you here. But how difficult was that transition from Nestle or a company that makes products many of us are very familiar with, to the world of pharmaceuticals that would appear to be very complex?

Erwan Vilfeu: Well, not necessarily. I mean, first of all, Nestle I’m not sure how many people have noticed that Nestle was created by the pharmacist who invented some infant formulas. And although Nestle is selling a lot of food, products, like confectionaries, and pizzas and water, etc., they mostly care a lot about nutrition and how to give the great food to get people to live a good life. So, there’s constant focus on the contents, the vitamins that the food additives you put inside making the product natural, making the product good for consumption, to get people living a healthy life. And you have branches in Nestle like baby nutrition and saddle nutrition, even some dermatologic products that I was handling that somehow connected me to that work. The second thing which is also probably an interesting insight is when I changed. The company that hired me was interested obviously, by my background, but among all the things although I didn’t have any experience purely to pharmaceutical products. I had some experience with Korea and that was what’s for them was critical getting somebody that understands Korea and can drive a business in Korea with all the regulatory all the cultural aspects which are very critical to drive successfully something in Korea.

Alex Jensen: And that leadership level, then how different is your job now? Did you take on a lot of the things that you’d learned from Nestle and implement them the same way with Zuellig Pharma? Or did you take the opportunity to do things differently because you’d learn those lessons?

Erwan Vilfeu: I think each time you change, some it changed. For a different country. Obviously, the most important thing is to take on one side of your learning your experience, building a site on the other sides come with an open mind and trying to be very curious to understand the world around you and how people are working. In that sense, it was very interesting for me to come to from Nestle two totally different world, because I spend the first two to three months most of the time on the field trying to meet the doctors, the pharmacists, in the hospitals, you know, the medical reps, and asking as many question without being shy, and it was a lot of humidity trying to understand how people are doing things and you come up with a lot of questions. And in your life, sometimes even people have been working in the field for many years. They kind of answer these questions and that allows you to start reflecting with them, and how can we do things better? Is it logical? How can we do things in a more efficient way? And that’s has been a fantastic journey, because we made when I arrived, a big project, we’ve all teamed where we kind of lined up the transformation journey for the next 3, 4 years with all of the things we wanted to change. And obviously, you have to work with people that have the expertise of the category the experience of the industry as well and putting all the things together. You can make it work and we got great results. I think we had a fantastic year so far, Zuellig really changing transforming the company in a totally different, different place.

Alex Jensen: But when someone’s coming to Korea in a leadership position, and much of the staff are Korean, do you think it’s more important to bend to the Korean culture? The traditionally rigid Korean workplace has many people view it especially with the with the lines of leadership and age and so on or do you feel that no, you should globalize that workplace, and everybody should try to adapt to that.

Erwan Vilfeu: I think Korea’s changing I mean, in 6, 7 years, I’ve seen a lot of things evolving, you know, in a good way. Then the next thing is the current system. We have to you can like it or dislike it, but it’s been very efficient, if you see where Korea stands now. Now, there are things that in my conceptions, my view of driving a company, I wanted to change both Nestle and Zuellig, which is mostly allowing much more transparency at all levels in the companies breaking down the silos getting away to be much more closer to each other’s a bit breaking the your key barriers to make sure people can talk to each other is no matter what is your age, what is your title, we will bring value in the company and we all have the equal ability to talk and share one’s ideas and participate to the progress of the company. So, in both companies, that’s really something I worked on, and I know a lot of my colleague CEO was doing the noise the same. We worked on simplifying the titles, making sure people can express themselves, creating forums where we share with transparency how the company’s doing the strategy. We innovated the office for example, getting everybody to sit including myself in a new open space. So, and a lot of digital tools to exchange to load some forums for people to participate. I think that that’s something which is really critical to have some flatter, your keys where people feel more engaged and not just top down your keys where you just have to apply what’s coming from the top. That’s I think one of the critical things I’ve been trying to change, and you have people are responding extremely well to that. Because you find people with super high level of indications in Korea that are really doing a great job and if you allow them to express themselves here you get great results immediately.

Alex Jensen: The pandemic has disrupted everything not as your industry and part of that has been the way we work a lot more tele working, for example, can you see some of those changes lasting forever now, or are you starting to get back to normal per se?

Erwan Vilfeu: It’s interesting because in line of what I was describing just before, one big change we decided to introduce was to try to get people to value their teams. According to their performance, individual’s on teams according to the performance and not anymore, by the time we spend in the office, it’s very easy for me to oblige you to stay 6, 7, 10 hours in the office doesn’t mean you’ll be productive, be doing a good job and what we included in our transformation journey, and that we started before the pandemic in the way we are, we reorganize the office will so to allow people to get some flexibility at what time they want to come to work and how many days they want to spend in the office. And that comes with the different ways to different KPIs to measure people’s performance, which is not necessarily something easy. It’s a transition that is sometimes a bit complicated for some more traditional managers. But we introduced all that just before the pandemic. And interestingly, we renovated the office and introduced all this system, sending everybody home, or what we’re doing your organization of the office, and when people had to come back to the office, or partially come back to the office, that’s where the pandemic started. And so, people stayed more in at home. And that’s great because we were totally prepared for what was coming. So, we went through all the pandemic crisis with roughly people coming half of the time in the office, depending of the departments, I would say some departments need to require to be a bit more in the office over or a bit less, you have also some personal situation which are different, some people can work well at home, some people prefer to be in the office. But that the new system we put in place, which allows more flexibility works very well. And we forced it to be to get people a bit more at home when we’re in alert for. But we know honestly going to get back to what we had 3, 4 years ago, when situation gets back to normal in terms of pandemic, I think we still owe people’s to stay a couple of days at home and be very flexible in the way they arrive in the office and leave the office day to day.

Alex Jensen: Speaking of the impact of the pandemic. It’s remarkable, isn’t it? How names like Pfizer and AstraZeneca are just household names. And there are a lot more vaccine experts than they used to be as well. How permanently do you think the pandemic has changed the pharmaceutical industry?

Erwan Vilfeu: Well, that’s part of the things that’s partly something that attracted me in the sector. It’s a sector, which is moving very fast with a lot of innovation. It’s been a lot of things coming up in the past 10 years in multiple areas, in oncology in the in dermatology in the, in gets diabetes against so many fields. So, the pandemic just highlighted all the great work, pharmaceutical companies were doing, and they showed how they were capable to develop vaccines and get it approved in just a very short period of time. But it’s just a process that that started. And it’s still accelerating because there’s more and more capabilities to develop more advanced drugs and deploy them in the countries. So, nothing new here. Now, there’s been a lot of investments with the pandemic, a lot of attentions, lots of investments at all levels in development in distributions. And in the many things that have changed the way people are now approaching health care, which definitely are going to participate to the acceleration that had started before.

Alex Jensen: Yet we’ve had this major focus on vaccines, and that’s just obviously will be a big part just a part of the pharmaceutical industry. Landscape. Can you tell us a bit more about what Zuellig does, which many people might have just heard of the company but not be too familiar with in itself?

Erwan Vilfeu: Yeah, so Zuellig Pharma was still a family-owned company was created over 100 years ago. It’s a Swiss company. We mostly do business in Asia, and we had quite as in Singapore and Zuellig is non-manufacturing drug. We are a healthcare service company we do. We don’t manufacture but we do everything else between the manufacturers and the patients or the doctors. We are helping to distribute the drugs; we’re helping to do all the logistics we reach. If I’m looking at Korea, we are reaching 20,000 pharmacies, 3,000 clinics, 5,000 hospitals, and we distribute all sorts of products from ambience, cold chain products, medical devices, animal health, ethical drugs, OTC so all sorts of drugs. Apart from the distribution and logistics, we have clinical trials activity where we support pharmaceutical companies to in their clinical trials and processes. We have an agency, which is doing digital marketing, webinars, and all sorts of other solutions to communicate to the doctors. And then we have the commercialization branch, which is licensing drugs and distributing these drugs in the country.

Alex Jensen: When we speak of the Korean market, particularly. It seems to love its prescription medications, and what are the particular demands of this market for you?

Erwan Vilfeu: It’s a very interesting, and very advanced health care markets, with people who are very much taking care of their health systems where people are doing the health checks every year, is very interesting and it’s low to detect disease at a very early stage. It’s also markets where the population is aging fast, which is not the oldest population in the world, but he’s aging extremely fast. So, there are many challenges, which we have to look into for the future with a lot of chronic disease that are growing up, which comes with a cost becomes even necessity for new innovative drugs. And I think one of the interesting elements as well, which happened during the pandemic is that we’ve seen how the government’s and the pharmaceutical industry have been able to collaborate to get innovative drugs faster on the market, which is something where the industry believe we can improve. Obviously, the government has some important things to check on their science, like the safety of the drugs, the costs of the drugs, and before loading the drugs to access in the market. But the pace of innovation has been so high that it has great innovative drugs and out there and one of the key challenges, how can we get these drugs to come faster in the markets because a lot of patients can be saved, and find back their life?

Alex Jensen: Yeah, it’s an excellent point, which the pandemic brought into very sharp focus in any ordinary time, if you didn’t have the desperation in the COVID situation, for example, can you imagine something like those early vaccines being released the way they were?

Erwan Vilfeu: I think it’s totally amazing to see how in multiple countries around the words, research and development and distributions, and manufacturing of all these drugs were all activated in the recall time. I think there’s been no present examples of drugs being developed, authorized in the market in such a high speed. And, obviously, there’s been a lot of equations from patients on the safety of the drugs and because of the clinical trials that were, that were done there. Just as the same time as the drugs were developed, but the whole process was done in a very safe way and the outcome is absolutely fantastic.

Alex Jensen: Well, in the fact that South Korea’s now past 70%, for fully vaccinated population in a very short period of time, compared with some other countries that had a head start and are still yet to reach that rate. It kind of tells us something doesn’t it? about this market about the attitude of the people that you were reflecting before with the interest in healthcare.

Erwan Vilfeu: Yeah, that’s I think that’s what you see in all sectors. They may have a slow start, but when we decided to go ahead, Korean is extremely fast and efficient and I think all they manage the crisis, you know, in a pretty good way. They’ve been able to contain the number of cases and deaths, much better than many other countries in the world. That’s thanks to the discipline of the people and the way they’ve been handling and forming the people about the pandemic, but you’re right to highlight that on the vaccines they were, they had a lifestyle, they had issues of supply. And then they’ve been able to catch up pretty efficiently and now we have a very good portion of population which is vaccinated, which is absolutely fantastic.

Alex Jensen: What’s pharmaceutical supply? Like generally, though, at the moment. Is it pretty decent again because I know there were a few news stories suggesting massive disruption there?

Erwan Vilfeu: No, we find there’s no big issues. Korea also has good local manufacturing capability, probably not on the most innovative drugs, but on most drugs on the market. So, there’s no reason to worry about the supply of drugs in Korea, we were pretty fine.

Alex Jensen: How do we get more of those innovative drugs on the ground here, though? Is there something that you would like to share today, that would be a message, even just a positive message for the authorities, I don’t want to push you into a controversial statement unless you want to issue one. But it does seem like officials could be a little more open to experimentation and open minded on some of the amazing medical breakthroughs that are happening throughout the world. Again, something that might be fueled by the experience of COVID.

Erwan Vilfeu: I think they are not going to get into details of the regulamentation here. The why’s can be a bit complicated, but I think, with a lot of lessons from the current pandemic crisis, and again, if we can start to work the same way worked on the pandemic on all the types of drugs that will facilitate things. I am very positive the government is a, has been open to dialogue and, and discussions on all these topics. Things might not be moving as fast as we want, because obviously, I think they factures want you to push down to the market as fast as possible than drugs. Some patients are needs and would like to have his drugs to be reimbursed. Also understand on the other side that the government has some constraints and cannot give the authorization to all the drugs. But yes, there might be ways to ease the regulamentation and give them equal rights to all companies to get their drugs in the market in more easy way. And I think things should be progressing in the right direction. So, taking the learnings of the pandemic.

Alex Jensen: Is that something that we could comment on in terms of democratization of pharmaceuticals, because here in Korea, we seem to do very well making quality medications more affordable than say, for example, the United States. And we’ve seen a lot of debate as well during this pandemic about making vaccines more widely available. I don’t want to focus necessarily on vaccines with this answer just using it again, as a case study. Do you think that we’ve learned lessons sufficiently on how to also make life saving medications more affordable more widely?

Erwan Vilfeu: I think Korea is on that side allowing wide access to healthcare and to drugs in a very efficient way. And that’s also part probably of the discussions we have could the prices of the drugs in Korea somehow cheaper than in many other countries in the world, so many other countries. So that’s part of the tensions in bringing very innovative drugs to control the price that I think that side it’s one of the positive things is that the government is allowing the access to the drugs to whole population.

Alex Jensen: Now with all these considerations that you’re carrying on your shoulders, there are stresses that come with that. And I wanted to lighten the mood a little bit by just asking how you’re actually just enjoying life in Korea.

Erwan Vilfeu: I’m enjoying very much where I’m staying. it’s a fascinating place which is moving so fast. I was actually tracing I was commenting life in Korea, I have a couple of friends that left Korea during summertime, and they were telling me how much missing Korea. I find it fascinating how things are changing. If I’m reflecting back in the 6 or 7 years, I’ve been here a lot of the changes that happens and in Seoul and outside of Seoul. And by the way thing when a great thing of the pandemic is that it forced a lot of people to get out of Seoul and discover Korea instead of traveling to the countries around and find out there’s a lot of nice things in that in Korea so I’m really enjoying the place it’s a fascinating place. it’s been commented more and more outside of the world, know ‘Squid game’, which is now over the place. But it’s also amazing to see how many people in Europe and I guess in all the countries around the world are talking about Korea. So very glad to be here.

Alex Jensen: Well, I was told by a friend of a friend that you have a couple of interesting hobbies, one of which is flying and another of which is foiling. Flying I guess it’s self-explanatory, although it’s interesting in itself, but foiling I’m not really sure what that is.

Erwan Vilfeu: The following is, let’s start by the key thing I was doing was, it’s mostly kitesurfing or windsurfing. Long time ago, I moved to kitesurfing, which is something I really like. So, for people who don’t know what kitesurfing is, the other boat and you just have a large kite which is pulling you with the wind. Now, what people have been doing in multiple sports, what sports is putting a foil under the bolt or under the boat, you see that if you see the Americas cap the globe, you see how, and the latest boats are now all using foils. The foil is just kind of wing that you have under the boats, and we just speed coming up the wing will be lift the board of the boat is on their boat of the water. So, you remove a lot of the drag. It’s rowing you to go faster and through the waves. And it’s an absolutely fantastic sensation because you were you kind of flying over the all the water suddenly and you gain a lot of speed.

Alex Jensen: Where do you do have?

Erwan Vilfeu: Well, I started buying my own foil putting it under my kites bought 3, 4 years ago.

Alex Jensen: In Korea, though.

Erwan Vilfeu: Yeah, so I learned in the Philippines Boracay, we have a great lagoon, which is best place to learn. I probably swallowed hell for the water in the lagoon. Because it’s not as simple as you may think. Although I was doing kitesurfing at a pretty good level. You cannot start from scratch again. And I’ve been using the foil boat in Han River, we’re doing some wakeboarding, such as behind a boat, which is fine. Not as fun as doing kitesurfing. But it’s nice.

Alex Jensen: You haven’t swallowed half of the Han River, or even any of it. I sometimes wonder seriously when I see people waterskiing on the Han River. Firstly, I wonder like they’re doing it in sometimes outside summer season and you think Isn’t it cold? But then I think what happens if they fall in and they’re swallowing that a city River? How sort of clean can it be? So, can you tell me?

Erwan Vilfeu: Yeah, fishes. I’m safe, didn’t had any issues. But I asked myself the same question at some points, and I just want to go on. I’ve been doing a lot of kitesurfing in Africa, offshore for Macron (28:10) in Ghana, and I can tell you the water was probably better or worse, sorry, worse than in Han River so. So far so good. No, I think it’s surprisingly cleaner than what you could think. You should try it.

Alex Jensen: But knowing Korea and its interest in healthcare that we already talked about today, I imagine. And maybe this is something to find out for all of us, but I imagined that they simply wouldn’t allow it. If it wasn’t enough. Maybe I’m just being hopeful. But yeah, well keep enjoying the watersports, keep enjoying the high life, quite literally as well with the kitesurfing and flying. But thank you also for giving us an insight into your position of leadership and your industry here in Korea. Is there any final word of advice that you would share if imagine if I was about to take a leadership position in Korea and I was working in Europe or the US or wherever? And I was saying what advice would you have for me? Is there anything particularly short and sweet that you could share?

Erwan Vilfeu: I think it’s a unique adventure and fantastic experience people should enjoy so if you have the possibility to come and work in Korea, it’s definitely not easy. It’s definitely going very fast. It has a lot of challenges and people are all the companies competition is moving fast changing innovating super rapidly. It’s also a place where you definitely learn certain fields a lot, like all the digital field a lot of things happening which is absolutely fascinating. So, it’s really something I would advise you to do if you have the opportunity come over. You love it.

Alex Jensen: Well, there’s a few things me myself living in Korea that I’ll have to try well, based on your advice today Erwan Vilfeu, the president of Zuellig Pharma Korea, thank you very much for joining us on today’s edition of Koreabizcast.

Erwan Vilfeu: Thank you, Alex. It was wonderful to talk to you.

Alex Jensen: And let me also say thank you to everyone for joining us today. And to our sponsor, you can find it fourseasons.com/seoul. See you again tomorrow from 7am Korea time.