A one-sided but engrossing insider’s view of corporate scheming behind the vaccine triumphs.
Tumultuous battles among shareholders and management have roiled the Chinese company that makes a leading Covid-19 vaccine, according to this business book.
Halesworth recaps the history and fortunes of Sinovac, a Beijing biopharmaceutical firm and maker of the CoronaVac vaccine, from a deeply informed but materially interested perspective. He’s the founder and portfolio manager of Heng Ren Partners, a Boston hedge fund that owns Sinovac stock. He starts with an upbeat but sketchy rundown of CoronaVac’s success as an easy-to-store vaccine, with hundreds of millions of doses sold to developing countries despite its mediocre performance. (Studies put its efficacy in preventing mild and severe infections at 50.4% in Brazil.) The author soon turns from science to the book’s focus: disputes between Sinovac’s management and some of its investors over company governance and stock buyouts. The main issue was a 2016 Sinovac buyout proposal that offered investors $6.18 per share, a figure that Halesworth argues was far too low for the company’s true valuation. He further claims that Sinovac persistently played down the company’s prospects in order to keep the share price and the buyout cost low. The thorny situation became a rivalry between chairman and CEO Weidong Yin and his former partner Aihua Pan, leader of a dissident investors’ group that presented a competing buyout bid of $7 (later $8) per share. In Halesworth’s telling, the Pan Group won majority support in a shareholders’ vote, but when the Yin Group clung to power and issued new shares to friendly investors, things turned nasty. According to Sinovac, Pan Group minions tried to occupy the firm’s Beijing facilities and the police got involved. The struggle then proceeded down a labyrinth of lawsuits.
Halesworth gives an absorbing account of this contentious episode, complete with intriguing characters and a classic shareholder-meeting showdown where wily lawyer James Chang turned the tables on the Yin Group’s complacent board. The author sets it against a cogent analysis of the difficulties of the vaccine business—Sinovac’s SARS vaccine suddenly lost its potential market when that pandemic fizzled in 2005—and of the traps awaiting Americans who invest in China. He contends that opaque Chinese companies are listed on American stock exchanges but are beyond the reach of United States regulators. Halesworth elaborates this critique in prose that’s lucid and lively. (“After going private, they would often do a new stock offering in China for a new stock listing to trade at three to five times the price paid to buy out shareholders in the United States. These were not your father’s Chinese Communists.”) But he does have a stake in the proceedings, and it shows. He did not favor the Yin Group’s “lowball squeeze out,” and he reprints part of an open letter questioning the accounting and ethics of Sinovac’s buyout proposal. The book contains much scolding and lobbying of company management, including suggestions for reconfiguring the board and hiring a PR firm, along with calls for both sides to withdraw the lawsuits so that Sinovac investors can better profit from the bull market in biotech and vaccines. Readers and investors will find rich food for thought from Halesworth’s take on the Sinovac wrangles, but they should keep in mind that he’s not a neutral observer.
A one-sided but engrossing insider’s view of corporate scheming behind the vaccine triumphs.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-70-609378-5
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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