Tycoon 1: This taipan is said to have already distributed his assets to his children, minus one who recently passed away.

Following Chinese tradition, the sons got a bigger share than the daughters combined but there’s still a lot of doubt within the business sector if the conglomerate will outlast the taipan.

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Ttycoon 2: Maybe he’s much older and wiser now. Maybe he’s very proud of his son who turned his back on his family’s wealth.

Whatever the reason, this tycoon is now willing to give his estranged son his fair share of the patrimony, but the son has politely turned down the offer. You see, the son has done very well for himself, thank you, without any help from the father.

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Based on the list of the Department of Health, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the only top three drug company included in its voluntary reduction price list that takes effect on August 15. GSK is listed for its antibiotics, specifically amoxicillin plus clauvulanic acid.

Oh yes, Pfizer’s hypertensive drug Norvasc, which has the active ingredient amlopidine, is covered by a maximum drug retail price.

The country’s biggest drug companies are Philippine-owned United Laboratories and multinational companies GSK and Pfizer, in that order. Unilab, which controls more than 30 percent of the domestic market, was put up by Jose Campos Yao and Mercury Drug founder Mariano Que. Because it is a privately owned company, it is not surprising that its current president is Campos Yao’s grandson Clinton Hess.

Multinational corporations (MNC) claim they could have easily brought down the price of medicines without government telling them to do so  if they didn’t have to pay a 20-percent tax on imported drugs. In the same breath, MNCs claim potential losses of between P12 billion and P15 billion from the implementation of the law on cheaper medicines.

Then again, countries within Southeast Asia account for only 3 percent of the MNCs’ total drug sales, so these companies can easily drop their prices.

As it is, the hypertensive medicine choice of doctors, Norvasc, registered annual retail sales of P2 billion in 2008.  Okay, okay, so P300 million went to the government as value-added tax and another P700 million went to distributors, like drugstores, but that still left Pfizer with a net income of P1 million from Norvasc alone.

As everybody knows, the government is supposed to review the cheaper medicines law within three to six months after its implementation this Saturday.

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A retired nuclear physicist is putting up a patented factory design in his hometown of Iloilo to produce coconut nectar, the byproduct of coconut flowers.

Since the nectar can be harvested regularly without damaging the tree, farmers engaged in this activity can earn 10 times as much as the average P3,000 they earn per month.

Oh, yes, the patented design doesn’t involve heating, which means all those amino acids and minerals necessary for human health aren’t destroyed.