Business ethics, which has also being called corporate ethics, is now becoming more and more important in today’s society. There’s a growing emphasis on this issue and it actually reflects in many aspects of a company which include a company’s finance, human resource management, sales and marketing and production. Sometimes, it even involves government rules and laws like tax payments, products’ ingredients.

The Chinese Milk Scandal was one of the world largest food safety incident that shock the whole world in the year of 2008. It was reported that six infants died from kidney stones, and thousands of other infants were being hospitalized.

The report shows that the chemical material which is called melamine was added to the milk and formula. After the case happened, the government of New Zealand says that  Fonterra, the largest shareholder with SanLu company found out the formula milk had problems in August, they tried to talk to SanLu to return all the formula that SanLu produced, however, their efforts did not get any attention from Chinese company and the local government was trying to hide the truth. Fonterra could only directly communicate with the central government of China to solve this problem.  SanLu suddenly faced social criticism and ethical doubts. A company should not only to make profits but more importantly, it should take responsibility of its clients, it is also the behavior of taking responsibility of its credit.

Chinese milk producers putting melamine in baby milk

(Link to Youtube Video)

Without business ethics, a company would not be able to do business for a long time, it is still going to be condemned by the society and will be paying compensation and costs due to its behavior.

Work Cited:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal#Cover-up_allegations