PharmaEssentia Corp (藥華醫藥) has welcomed a German Supreme Court ruling that it said “set aside” damages it was ordered to pay in a contract dispute with an Austrian drug developer.
At the same time, the Austrian company, AOP Orphan Pharmaceuticals GmbH, said the ruling validated part of its position in the dispute and vowed to continue to pursue damages for breach of contract.
In a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange late on Tuesday, PharmaEssentia said it had been notified by its German counsel that the German Federal Court of Justice decided to set aside an unfavorable order to the company by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) in 2020.
The ICC had ruled that PharmaEssentia should pay an arbitral award of 142 million euros (US$161.5 million) to AOP for improperly trying to terminate a license agreement for a new blood cancer drug.
However, the German court seemed to agree, at least to a certain extent, with PharmaEssentia’s argument that the award was greatly inflated, because it was based on incomplete information and procedurally flawed.
PharmaEssentia said that as a result of the Supreme Court ruling, it “is not ordered to pay AOP damages and to reimburse its costs.”
The court also did not refer the case back to the Higher Regional Court or the arbitral tribunal, said PharmaEssentia, a global pharmaceutical company founded by a group of Taiwanese-American scientists in 2003.
That meant “the decision of the arbitral tribunal is thus finally dropped,” an outcome that “has a positive impact on the company,” PharmaEssentia and its lawyers said
However, the Austrian company expressed a different view of the court’s ruling, arguing that “the decision has no implication regarding the merits of AOP’s claims against PharmaEssentia and will only result in protracted further proceedings.”
The German court upheld the award finding the PharmaEssentia-AOP deal valid and PharmaEssentia liable for certain damages, and it also dismissed all of PharmaEssentia counterclaims against it, AOP said.
AOP did acknowledge that the court “found procedural flaws with respect to product supply and damage quantification, impacting the damages awarded.”
AOP Health Group founder and board member Rudolf Widmann said the company was disappointed that the court found flaws in the reasoning regarding damages.
“We have no doubt that we will ultimately also recover these confirmed damages in further proceedings. We will take all necessary steps in due course to have this ultimately confirmed by an enforceable arbitral award,” he said.
The two companies inked a deal in 2008 to develop the blood cancer drug Besremi, but the agreement began to sour in the years that followed, and PharmaEssentia attempted to terminate the agreement.
AOP claimed it was being forced to renegotiate the deal on less favorable terms, with PharmaEssentia alleging that AOP was refusing to recognize its obligation to share data about the drug.
AOP started the arbitration in Frankfurt, Germany, before an ICC tribunal in 2018, which sided with AOP and issued its 142 million euros award in 2020.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts