Bristol Talks the Talk in Mandarin

I was all set to write a blog today about Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY) and a little-known company called Exelixis (EXEL) becoming the latest pharma-biotech hookup. Bristol-Myers Squibb is giving Exelixis nearly $200 million cash money up front to buy into a couple of cancer drugs.

I was going to blog about looking for more such partnerships, in-licensing deals and straight-up buyouts to continue and possibly at a faster pace.

But when I went to Bristol's web site to retrieve the link to the press release about the deal, I stumbled onto what I think is an even more blogworthy item. On the homepage, under the column the company refers to as "Top Story," Chinese characters immediately caught my eye. At first I thought I had somehow inadvertently gone to an international BMY web site and had to do a double take. But as I read on my curiosity was piqued.

Bristol makes a drug called Baraclude for Hepatitis B. Worldwide sales of the product were up a whopping 100 percent in the third quarter to $144 million. It's a drug and disease that I have not followed, so it was news to me that more than half of the estimated 1.25 million Hep B patients in the U.S. are Asian or Pacific Islanders. And that's why Bristol has decided to target a big part of that population by rolling out a unique direct-to-consumer ad campaign in Mandarin. The effort includes two TV commercials that you can watch here and that have started airing on a couple of small Chinese-language TV stations here in the New York-area. A spokesperson says Bristol plans to roll them out in other markets soon and to produce them in other Asian languages next year.

Bristol apparently put out a press release in English and Chinese last week about the campaign, but for whatever reason it flew under our radar. When you get as many press releases as we do, it is really difficult for announcements like this to break through the clutter. It took the visual of the Mandarin characters at the top of the Bristol homepage to grab my attention.

In addition to saying they wanna be like biotech, nearly every major pharmaceutical company is talking about the importance of emerging markets to their future growth--i.e. China, India, Russia, etc. Bristol-Myers Squibb is focusing on an emerging market within a developed market.