New | Regent Pacific mutates into selling pharmaceuticals to save sagging fortunes

Regent Pacific Group said it plans to begin selling a spray-on treatment in Hong Kong for men’s premature ejaculation by the end of 2017, in the former coal miner’s latest transformation to reverse its financial slump.

Shares of the company jumped almost 84 per cent on November 14 in Hong Kong, after Regent rolled out the first batch of its Fortacin drug in Britain, with plans to sell the treatment in Germany, Spain and France by Italian pharmaceutical company Recordati SpA. Regent shares have tripled to HK$0.61 in two weeks since the announcement.

This is the latest transformation in the company’s 25-year history, from financial services during the 1990s to coal mining in 2005 and now to pharmaceuticals.

Founded by Jim Mellon -- renowned as Britain’s answer to Warren Buffett for turning fortunes out of Russia’s transformation during the 1990s -- Regent Pacific last year bought British drugmaker Plethora Solutions Holdings, which had received EU regulatory approval for its formula to treat premature ejaculation.

China and Japan may have to wait three or four years for Fortacin, as local laws require clinical trials for imported medicines to be repeated for the drug’s entry into Asia’s two largest economies, said Regent’s chief science officer Michael Wyllie.

“I developed Viagra many years ago. For every thousand who suffers from erectile dysfunction, there is one thousand suffering from this as well,”Wyllie said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. “There is roughly one out of three or four individuals that experience it.”

One of the masterminds behind Viagra, the Scotsman spent one and a half decades with the US pharmaceutical company that produces some of the world’s best-selling drugs such as Lipitor and Lyrica. It took his team three years to develop formulation and another three years to see it go through clinical trials for regulatory approval.