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  Ferring Pharmaceuticals Ferring Pharmaceuticals is a global biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Switzerland with a product focus on fertility, gastroenterology, and urology. In the current crisis, changes are emerging in Ferring’s market environment which hold risks and opportunities and require the company to evaluate direction and strategy thoroughly. Managed by the central strategy department and moderated and advised by Metaplan, representatives from various subsidiaries in Europe, the USA, and Asia met to think about how the pharmaceutical industry in general, and Ferring specifically, will be affected by the economic crunch, and how Ferring could get a competitive advantage out of this turmoil. First, questions and topics had to be substantiated and specified. How will the crisis affect the fertility business, 50% of which is privately funded? What kind of changes and consolidations will take place with pharmaceutical wholesalers and distributors? What consequences will plans of the new U.S. administration for compulsory insurance have? What opportunities will cash-hungry start-ups offer? The questions go on and on. All of these questions are highly complex and contain variables with numerous unknowns. Some of them are closely linked, others are just standing side by side; partly their relevance for Ferring’s business is obvious and in other cases the connection is not as apparent. Guaranteeing open reflection, while at the same time channeling fruitless discussions and asking indepth questions where useful, demanded the Metaplanners’ complete skill set. An additional challenge was that although the majority of the participants spoke fluent English, they were not native speakers. The Metaplanners ensured not only a clean structure of the content, but also that for further procedures different activity levels were differentiated and were strictly handled separately. It is imperative that some problems are acted on immediately, for others still more information has to be gathered, and for many questions further developments just have to be closely watched to be able to react quickly, should the environment change. In this Metaplan-led process, not only opportunities and risks of the crisis were reflected successfully, but concrete agreements were also made.
ThomasSchnelle@metaplan.com
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