Japanese online store sold drugs whose sell-by date had passed at discounted prices

October 4, 2013 Leave a comment

Online store sold drugs whose sell-by date had passed at discounted prices

KYODO

OCT 4, 2013

An online drugstore was found to have offered for sale in late July through a shopping mall of Yahoo Japan Corp. non-prescription medicines that had passed their expiry dates, and at below market prices, sources familiar with the matter said Thursday. This is the first case of its kind, and came to light as online sales of non-prescription medicines is gaining momentum in the absence of regulations to ensure the safety of drugs sold online.Yahoo Japan said it deleted mall pages offering the drugs on the grounds the marketing violated company guidelines for appropriate sales practices.

The incident has also led the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare to consider including a ban on the sale of out-of-date medicines in new rules for online drug sales.

Although Japan does not have any law banning sales of out-of-date medicines, such drugs are usually not sold at drug stores operated by licensed pharmacists.

The online drugstore was selling several types of non-prescription drugs at below market prices by saying that they “have passed their expiry dates,” Yahoo Japan said without identifying the drugs.

Yahoo Japan said it is now seeking to determine what quantity of medicines were sold.

In January, the Supreme Court ruled that an ordinance issued by the ministry that uniformly banned online sales of certain categories of drugs was “illegal and invalid.”

Following the top court ruling, the government in mid-June began allowing more than 99 percent of non-prescription drugs to be sold in Japan via the Internet.

Filed under Health

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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