Interview with Peter Rothschild

Interview with CEO Peter Rothschild for introduce.se, you can also watch the video here (in swedish)

Could you tell us a about the agreement you just signed for the Japanese market, and what it will mean for BioGaia?

We have signed an agreement with a Japanese company called Nippon Access, which is owned by a large trading company, Itochu. This agreement is very important for us since we have been trying to find a good strategy in Japan for a long time now. There are a lot of different ways to enter the market in Japan, we think that we now have found a good way since Nippon access covers all marketing channels. This way we don’t have to work with many different partners and it gives us a lot of extra marketing muscle. I think this agreement is very exciting and promising.

You are constantly entering new markets, and will during 2010 enter another 20 countries. Could you tell us more about how you are handling this from an organizational point of view.

We are starting to get the hang of this now, we are present in approx 50 countries now and another 30 or so in the pipe line, this year perhaps 20. So we have established a specific way of working with entering new markets, we have great personnel and produced good material. But it’s of course very hard work, we have to educate and train our partners sales teams, make sure that they have the right marketing material, the right information regarding clinical studies and so forth. We have had to strengthen our marketing department with a couple of people recently to deal with the increasing number of new markets.

How big potential do you see in increasing your partners supply of your products?

I think that most of the markets we are in at the moment are fairly undeveloped. If we look at the more developed markets we are in, like Finland and Italy, we are still growing there, this shows great potential on all of our markets. We are also growing by expanding our line of products, most recently we added the ORS (oral re-hydration solution) to the Swedish market, and this product is on its way to being launched in a number of other markets.

How big part of the total sales does the BioGaia brand stand for today, and how do you see this developing in the future?

Approximately 30 % of all finished products are being marketed under the BioGaia brand, we are constantly trying to increase this figure. Although we have a couple of old agreements, all new agreements that are being made states that the products will be marketed under the BioGaia brand, and our goal is naturally to increase the number of products being sold under the BioGaia brand.

Could you tell us a bit more about your clinical research programme and if there are any areas you se great potential in?

We have one area, which we are very excited about, and that is Helicobacter Pylori, the bacteria that causes gastric ulcers. We are doing some clinical studies in the area at the moment, though we don’t yet know the outcome. However it’s a very interesting field and I think that we have found an approach that might work.