Ours is a medium sized corporation, not a major like Merck or Bristol-Myers.  Let's get down to brass tacks.    Sales of our AIDS drug Midec run at $200 million, in the 7^th year of our patent.  Our new twice-a-day drug, EXit, earned us $350 million last year and has almost doubled this year.  Of course, as  EXit sales climb, Midec sales may falter. 

Best guess:  $700 million this year, world wide revenues, for both drugs.  That’s 10% of our total revenue (For Merck, AIDS drugs are less than 5%.)    Our profit of 26%  is about the same as the industry :    $18.2 million for AIDS drugs.

 However, the profits from the AIDS drugs are helping to stabilize Millennium’s bottom line:  we lose patent protection for three blockbuster drugs in the next two years.  We can expect to lose about 75-80% of sales and profits as generics come on line.   Ten of our patented drugs barely break even, and five lose money. 

 What we give to African countries has to be calculated as a percent of our  profits from AIDS drugs ($18.2 million).   I  think we can give 1% of those profits to the AIDS in Africa program.  That would be about $1.8 million this year.  Might be more, might be less in succeeding years.   Even it off to $2 million.  We can manage that. 

Personally, I’m appalled at the decision in the WTO in Qatar to permit poor countries to purchase generic drugs or produce them.   Generics devastate our revenues and profits.  Permitting them is Third World countries is to invite smuggling into this country and Western Europe.  We have seen  intense smuggling of AIDS drugs by the AIDS community.  No way are they going to pay full price if they can bring cheap knock-offs from abroad.  Most people pass through the “nothing to declare” line in customs;  when they ship boxes, they mislabel them.   The WTO action was popular in the Third World but we have to get it reversed.  Already Glaxo sent AIDS drugs to Africa--and someone rerouted them back to Europe and sold them in Germany and Netherlands for full price.