A digestion drug for the ages

Festal

Kim Jo-hyung, former president of and now an adviser to Handok Pharmaceuticals, remembers vividly the time he saw a flask at a local pharmacy in 1959, the year he joined the company. Inside the flask was an upside down saury fish - also known as a mackerel pike - in water containing Festal, a digestion drug. The head of the fish was flabby like melted jelly.

“Displaying the flask was very effective in distinctively featuring the Festal brand, which works well in digesting,” Kim later recalled.

Handok was the first company to bring a Western digestion drug into the country, importing Germany’s Hoechst brand (now called Sanofi-Aventis) in 1958 and calling it Festal. After the drug was introduced, it soon became popular among consumers, as it was more effective than other products available here at the time.

To bring the drug into the country, Kim Shin-kwon, honorary chairman of Handok, traveled to Germany and persuaded Hoechst senior executives to allow Korea to produce the product on its own turf. The executives were hesitant, claiming that Korea did not have the technology infrastructure and the overall stability to produce such a product on its own. One of the officials, Kim Shin-kwon recalled, even asked, “Isn’t Korean politics very unstable?”

Kim responded by saying that Handok had never missed a payment to a customer or partner and claimed that producing the drug domestically would foster growth in Korea’s pharmaceutical market since the product would be less expensive. The reasoning worked, and the two sides inked a deal.

In 1959, Handok completed its factory in Sangbong-dong, Seoul. It received drug elements by plane and started to produce Festal locally. It eventually became the market leader in Korea. As of last year, the company had sold a total of 3 billion tablets.

By Choi Ji-young [angie@joongang.co.kr]