On the Sept 8th in 2008, the Ministry of Public Health of China announced that a chemical material contaminated Sanlu milk powder. Sanlu was a leading company in China and they had a better reputation among the trade at that time. Therefore the number of babies who suffered from kidney stones and renal failure were over 1200 and there were even two babies died. After this incident, China started a large research on their food safety and the result was not optimistic.
In my opinion, when people were motivated by big profit, they become blind. They started to have a fluke mind, so they are brave to do illegal things. But actually they paid more for their action, for example, they lost their reputation and consumers’ trust, they lost even more money. All these advantages that they had before become their weaknesses. For those kinds of people, they have no sense of business ethics when they face huge profit. And the result of losing business ethics is to become a secondary company from a leading company or even the company will go bankrupt like Sanlu Company.
In conclusion, business ethics is a basic condition for a successful company, cause it can help a company to earn reputation and attract more supporters. It can also help the company to build a better internal environment.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2008/0917/p01s03-woap.html