This case is set January 2019. Song Jianping is senior advisor to Chinese pharmaceutical firm Artepharm, which has been engaging in malaria elimination in Africa since 2003. With a deep understanding of the African market, the company has developed an innovative approach to malaria elimination, stemming from traditional Chinese medicine. It created a combination drug marketed as Artequick and put forward an innovative programme called Fast Elimination of Malaria by Source Eradication (FEMSE). Despite the success of the FEMSE programme, which had been tested in the Comoros and eliminated about 95% of the malaria cases there, Artepharm had been facing a lot of challenges in commercialising its innovative and effective solution. These challenges include a lack of presence in the public market which was dominated by multinational corporations such as Novartis and generic pharmaceutical companies from India. Artepharm recognises that it has realised only a small fraction of the potential sales of antimalarial drugs on the African continent. Song is thinking about the next steps to increase Artequick sales, so that the company can become profitable and not rely on funding from its parent company and the Chinese government.

In January 2005, China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company (COSCO) announced it would join the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC). At that time, COSCO initiated sustainability reporting practices in line with the UNGC, and over the next six years these efforts evolved into an information technology platform integrating all the company's sustainability processes and indicators. In fall 2011, the company's leadership considered the following strategic questions: To what extent should COSCO refer to international and domestic sustainability standards in the platform framework? How far should COSCO go in promoting the sustainability system as a stand-alone product? What were the next steps in sustainability reporting, and should COSCO try to attain even higher reporting standards in the future? Moreover, related issues facing the company included: What would be the value in reaching higher sustainability and reporting standards, and how would internal and external stakeholders react? What challenges lay ahead for the consistent implementation of higher standards across COSCO's subsidiaries?

In October 2009, State Grid, the largest utility company in the world, and a pioneer and leader in CSR practices in China, was planning its 2009 CSR Report and long-term CSR implementation. Some of the specific challenges faced at the time include: How could the company balance the different stakeholder expectations and respond to their concerns in a clear and concise way? To what extent should the company reference international standards in its CSR reporting? How could it change the mindsets of 1.5 million employees across diverse geographies to help them abide by CSR principles and management policies on a daily basis? Finally, how could State Grid improve its stakeholder management to establish mutual trust with stakeholders so that they would see State Grid as a responsible company?