WireScreen

NEW: If you’ve been to your local pharmacy lately, there’s a chance that something you bought was produced with active ingredients that can be traced to #XUAR — and that it was manufactured using #Uyghur #forcedlabor. In Side Effects, we look at the human rights implications of those global pharmaceutical supply chain ties to the region. #China is the largest active pharmaceutical ingredient producer — and the second-largest pharmaceutical market — in the world. And many of the companies responsible for creating and maintaining that market rely on manufacturing bases in XUAR, a hotspot for human rights abuses and a key hub for several of China’s largest pharmaceutical companies (like Sinopharm, Xinjiang Dejuan Bioengineering, and Xinjiang Nuziline Bio-Pharmaceutical). In fact, 76 different pharmaceutical products exported from China are *only* produced in XUAR, including some over-the-counter pain relievers. For global supply chains, this means clear risk of exposure to forced labor. Still, several key global bodies continue to register and source from these XUAR-linked companies — including the FDA and USAID, as well as Japan’s Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency. As the global community continues to coalesce around forced labor legislation, it’s our hope that policymakers and private-sector actors alike can use the insights found in this report to bolster sanctions, derisk supply chains, and improve due diligence systems. Read 👇 https://lnkd.in/e5PdZcDf

The View from the Office. I met David Barboza in midtown at the offices of WireScreen, a company he co-founded with Lynn Zhang in 2019. It was late afternoon, so I had an espresso and snacked on some nuts. David is a former New York Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize. He spent two decades at the paper, covering the stock market and Chicago before moving to China in 2004. He was Shanghai bureau chief from 2008 to 2015. WireScreen grew out of a passion for China and a realization that there was a huge opportunity to provide data about the country because information about global business is increasingly important and hard to get. WireScreen is a bit like a Dun & Bradstreet database for China. It has fundamental information on 12 million companies and 25 million people. You can look up, for example, owners, management, stakeholders, key suppliers and customers. The database is both deep and wide. It cross indexes investors, companies and suppliers, providing an ability to evaluate supply chain risk and fulfill a basic business requirement to “know-your-customer.” The company has raised a total of $18 million from venture capital firms including Sequoia Capital and Harpoon Ventures. As part of the latest round of financing, PitchBook valued WireScreen at about $70 million.  So far, WireScreen has focused on selling to government agencies, multinational corporations, law firms and regulators. David said that in the future they may consider expanding to sell information to the financial industry. David said the key challenge hasn’t been procuring the data so much as “entity resolution,” which means accurately identifying which companies and people are cited in public filings and determining their connections. I first met David in 2018. I was working as a product head at Bloomberg at the time. He visited the office to kick around an idea about providing news and information on China. Six years later, here we are. I congratulated him on how far he’s come. He said there is still a long way to go. David can be reached on LinkedIn or for a warm intro DM me. #viewfromoffice

U.S. export controls for goods bound for #China are set to expand once more, posing potential challenges for global business operations. Understanding "Military End Use" is complex and is about to become more intricate. Join the upcoming WireScreen webinar "Military Civil Confusion - Strategies for Identifying Military End Users" on September 17th at 11 AM EST to delve into: - The Impact of New Regulations: Understand the updated "Military End Use" definition and its implications for your business. - Identifying Restricted End Users: Discover strategies for pinpointing organizations classified as military, military-support, intelligence, or foreign-security end-users. - Ensuring Compliance: Gain the knowledge to navigate stricter regulations and safeguard your operational efficiency. #ExportControls #ChinaTrade #MilitaryEndUse #Regulations #Compliance #GlobalTrade