Will GSK show us what ‘purpose before profit’ really means?

Keep your eye on GlaxoSmithKline. The UK-based multinational drug-maker represents the future, both as a mass-producer of the vaccines that we pray will finally defeat Covid-19 and as a beacon of the way shareholder capitalism will re-position itself in the post-pandemic era.

GSK last week announced a collaboration with its French rival Sanofi to create a Covid-19 vaccine that it aims to manufacture at the rate of ‘hundreds of millions of doses annually’ by the end of next year. That’s 20 months before we might begin to feel safe again but still ‘a significantly faster timeline than for normal vaccine development’. And science apart, what was eye-catching in the statement by GSK chief executive Emma Walmsley is that she does not ‘expect to profit from our portfolio of collaborations… during this pandemic’. Any short-term profit generated will be re-invested in virus research and ‘long-term pandemic preparedness’, while making vaccines available to the world’s poorest countries will also be ‘a key part of our efforts, including donations’.

Those aspirations give serious meaning to the fashionable mantra of ‘purpose before profit’ with which many other companies were toying — mostly in terms of long-dated net-zero-carbon pledges — before the pandemic. GSK’s press release on its Covid-19 response also speaks of ‘protecting the health and wellbeing of our people and managing our global supply chains to support patients and consumers’. But it contains no mention of shareholders and you may think that’s entirely right: any company with vital resources to help in this crisis should be doing just that, leaving normal financial factors (other than survival) aside.

But when it’s all over, the surviving beacons of capitalism will also need to re-assert the older mantra that profit is healthy because it pays taxes and pensions and fertilises growth; and that risk-capital must be properly rewarded or it will wither away.