Licensing selexipag to Actelion outside Japan (2008)

Giving up the selling role to keep the creating role

In 2008 Nippon Shinyaku had no apparatus for selling a pulmonary arterial hypertension drug worldwide. NS Pharma, its US subsidiary, was a base for gathering development information and had no sales function. Look for the fastest route by which a compound it had created could reach patients, and the answer arrives on its own: keep Japan, hand everything else to Actelion, the company already ahead in this field. It can be read as a bargain that gave up part of being a company that sells in order to maximize what it could achieve as a company that creates. Taking macitentan in return in 2010 appears to have been a device to keep the relationship from running only one way.

Entrusted revenue, though, does not stand on its own legs. A royalty is consideration that rides on another company’s sales, and when the patent expires nothing is left behind. Against $312.3M (¥49bn) of industrial-property income in the year ended March 2026, the domestic Uptravi that the company sold itself came to $110.6M (¥18bn). That the seventh mid-term plan was given over to advance investment aimed at getting past that patent expiry expresses well the character of what the 2008 decision brought. What it created reached the world; the counter it was sold across belonged, to the end, to somebody else.