Glaxo Wellcom and SmithKline Beechman merger

[James Love <love@cptech.org>]

Statement of Ralph Nader and James Love on proposed merger of Glaxo
Wellcom and SmithKline Beechman


FMI  202.387.8030
email:	ralph@essential.org
        love@cptech.org
	http://www.cptech.org

-----
The Proposed merger between Glaxo Wellcom and SmithKline Beechman will
lead to less competition and higher prices for consumers.  We are asking
the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission (EC)
competition authorities to reject the merger, on the grounds that the
merger will reduce competition for pharmaceuticals and other medical
inventions.

	We believe the principal forces driving the merger are the desire by
the merging companies to avoid competition among similar therapies,
including therapies which are not yet on the market, as well as the
personal benefits to executives who gain from the merger.

We are also asking U.S. and EC competition authorities to determine if
new health care technologies are so complex that high transaction costs
from fragmented intellectual property rights create disincentives for
R&D, anticompetitive patent pooling, and lead to ever greater mergers,
which have the undesirable consequence of greater monopoly power.  If
so, governments need to examine the need for greater use of compulsory
licensing in biotechnology.

	We are also interested in determining how the FTC and the EC will
respond to this merger, after the FTC approved the giant
Boeing/McDonnell Douglas merger, over the objections of the EC
competition authorities.  In some respects, the shoe is on the other
foot today.  


-- 
James Love
Consumer Project on Technology
P.O. Box 19367, Washington, DC 20036
love@cptech.org | http://www.cptech.org
202.387.8030, fax 202.234.5176