ARMED only with their passion for healing people and a manual tableting machine that can churn out a mere 400 tablets a day, the husband and wife team of Isosceles and Leonora Pascual started Pascual Laboratories in 1946. Manila then had barely emerged from the ravages of the Second World War and the Pascuals saw their countrymen’s urgent need for medicine. It was also a perfect opportunity for the couple to practice what they learned since both were chemistry graduates from the University of the Philippines Diliman, batch 1935.

The early years

The company’s first product was named CALDA, a supplement born out of Isosceles’ college thesis about the process of extracting calcium from animal bones and adding into it components of vitamins A and D. With a one-room facility adjacent to the Pascual’s Manila residence, Pascual Laboratories, in its early years, was a mom and pop operation with Isosceles taking charge of product development and marketing, often taking his sturdy 1948 Plymouth to the countryside promoting their medicines. Leonora, on the other hand, stayed home to run the finances, check the inventory and attend to the family’s needs. Isosceles’ hands-on participation in the business entered a brief hiatus when he answered the country’s call to serve as undersecretary for what was then known as the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Besides CALDA, which was a sort of cure-all medicine during the post war years, Pascual Laboratories’ early product line included Elixir Paregoric for stomachache, Kaobismot for diarrhea, and an antibacterial line known then as Sulfa drugs.

Like father, like son

The company’s operations were passed on later to the four Pascual children, Abraham, Nora, Mayumi and Solita. Dr. Abraham Pascual, currently the chairman of Pascual Laboratories, recalls that his father started grooming him for a career in pharmaceuticals way back when he was just 5 years old. “When people asked you what you would be when you grow up, tell them you would be a Doctor of Philosophy major in Chemistry,” he remembered his father’s instructions that sounded more like dictations. And Abraham did become one. He obtained his doctorate degree from the University of California in San Francisco, admitting that he was never forced to it and that the passion for chemistry runs in the family. Abraham shares that it is his parents’ values and deep spirituality that the children cherished the most. He describes his mother as a very caring woman and his father a very prayerful man.

Abraham and his beautiful wife Sylvia elated that four of their five children, are actively involved with the family company, making them the third generation Pascuals. His son Jappy is manning the supply chain management; his eldest daughter Maui recently joined as consultant for export and also sits in as president of another family business called Health Express; another daughter Mia handles corporate communications, advertising and marketing; and Mikey, the youngest son, joined the IT group utilizing his expertise on computers. Abraham adds that it is only his daughter Crissy, now based in New York, who opted to venture on her own. “But I have full respect for the wishes and dreams of my children. Wherever they can find their happiness and fulfillment, and whatever they do to become better persons, then they get my full support,” he intones.

Work and worship

Abraham strikes me as a man of deep spirituality. He says he sees no dividing line separating work from worship or the sacred from the secular. He emphasizes that if a man believes in the existence of the afterlife, then everything in this world is but a preparation for that ultimate destination. Abraham treats the family business as a healing ministry, thus it is an unwritten rule in the company that the welfare of the people should come first before profit. “Pricing is always an issue every time a new product is set to be launched because we believe there’s so much social responsibility in what we’re doing,” he explains.

Despite his benevolent attitude toward work and business, Abraham is a leader who believes that justice must be enforced with strength. He will not tolerate dishonesty or immorality among his employees. Expounding on the latter, he said “Paanong makakapagtrabaho ng matino ang isang empleyado kung dalawa ang asawa nito [How can an employee work properly and concentrate if he is having illicit affairs?]” Abraham admits that firing an erring worker has never been easy for him. Recalling the kindness of his father, he reveals, “My Dad never fired any of his employees. Not even one.”

Magnanimous vision

“I consider my parents patriots, but they were not nationalists, they were internationalists,” says Abraham explaining his father’s move to go to Europe in the 1960s to get new ideas to improve the company’s products. In 1971, Pascual Laboratories signed a licensing agreement with Mundipharma AG of Switzerland to manufacture and distribute Betadine microbiocides. Up to this day, the brand claims superiority over other povidone-iodine preparations in the country because only Betadine is Swiss-formulated and made from imported ingredients.

His parents’ unwavering commitment to excellence established the company’s credibility in the healing profession early on. “Because of my father’s reputation, doctors continue to perceive us as a company that produces excellent products,” he explains, in all humility.

The company is now reaping the fruit of its tradition of excellence. After 10 years of slugging it out with bigger competitors produced by the multinational biggies, Poten-Cee, Pascual Laboratories’ over the counter Vitamin C brand, made it to No.1. Poten-Cee is now the most popular Vitamin C in the market because it is affordable with features not found with its competitors like candy coating for easy swallowing, no sour or bitter aftertaste and being gentle to the stomach.

Abraham ultimate vision for the company is to see it included in the top five pharmaceutical companies in the country in the next 5 to 10 years. With such bullish determination, the main man of the company says that they are grabbing the competition by the horn. “We do not want to wait for any help from the government, we opted to initiate positive actions on our own,” he explains, pertaining to how local pharmaceutical companies are faring against their foreign competitors.

However, he doesn’t see any rivalry between Pascual Laboratories and other Filipino pharmaceutical firms. “We are all exerting commendable efforts in uplifting the quality of Philippine-made medicines and I’m proud of it,” he muses. Pascual Laboratories, with its subsidiaries and affiliates, is the second biggest Filipino pharmaceutical conglomerate and is ranked 12th largest among local pharmaceutical firms, multinationals included. Though the company has forged licensing agreements with foreign pharmaceutical companies, their own brands continue to cost 20 to 50 percent lower than foreign brands in the market.

Honoring heritage

The Pascuals recognize the importance of honoring heritage, and they have decided to make the family’s ancestral home at the back of their Balagtas, Bulacan plant to become a museum, featuring the personal belongings and collections of Isosceles and Leonora. Among the memorabilia on display are the couple’s rocking chair, credit cards, passports, religious icons and clothes. A wall in one of the rooms has the couple’s university diplomas and other certificates. One interesting document that always attracts attention is Leonora’s certificate of training from the Philippine Hypnosis Society dated January 20, 1974. “My mother used hypnosis on my father so that he will no longer look at other women,” Abraham’s lighter side comes out.

The Pascual children have fond memories of their grandparents on their rocking chairs during balmy afternoons relating that their lola shared with them businesses secrets even during recreation period. Maui says the family spent many happy hours on the house’s veranda overlooking a tilapia pond where the children will spend long hours fishing (or in local dialect namamansing). The fishes they caught were not free though, recalls Maui, because their grandmother will weigh them and each of them will pay a small token for the catch. To teach them to earn their keep, it was mandatory for all the Pascual children to work in the plant during vacations and to be treated no more special than the regular employees.

Passion for plants

Abraham inherited his mother’s passion for plants, an interest that led him to become a member of the governing council of the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development (PCHRD), the institution actively pushing for the development of Philippine-grown medicinal plants into herbal drugs. Noticing then that there were no herbal medicines registered as drugs with the Bureau of Food and Drugs, Abraham decided to use his expertise and resources to bring Philippine medicinal plants to the industry forefront. The endeavor is still in line with their mission to produce quality and affordable medicines. “To develop new synthetic drugs, you need close to a billion dollars to develop something that is really new, that you can patent and not even the biggest companies here could afford that. So, the next best thing for us is to develop off-patent medicines and herbal drugs,” he emphasizes. Pascual Laboratories eventually signed a license agreement with the PCHRD to manufacture and market ASCOF (Lagundi) and RELEAF (Sambong). To support the project, the family’s farm in Sta. Rosa, Laguna, initially developed by Pascual’s mother to be a mango orchard, was converted into an herbal farm. All indicators point to harvest time for the Pascuals. Ten years after ASCOF was introduced to Filipino consumers, it has now moved to the No. 8 position in the local cough remedy market.

Despite the accolades and successes, Abraham Pascual never loses sight of the company’s primary mission and that is to give Filipinos quality and affordable medicines. The Stokes hand-crank, single punch tableting machine, which was the first piece of equipment his parents has acquired, has now retired and is enshrined among the many souvenirs in their ancestral home. And inside their huge Bulacan manufacturing plant, modern machineries now produce and pack medicines at a rate of thousands an hour. He knows that the company is constantly scaling new heights and he will be needing all the help he can get to bring the company where he envisions it to be. And where can he find unconditional support but with his own flesh and blood. “I hope my children will continue this legacy because it’s good business. Healing people is very good business,” he reiterates.

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on The Manila Times