Local units of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies doing business in the Philippines offered to halve the prices of more than 80 best-selling drugs in a last-minute bid to dissuade the country’s president from imposing price controls on essential medicines.

The unusual collective action, which covers products that account for 10-15 per cent of the companies’ local sales, followed weeks of meetings with health officials and President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo over how to make medicines more affordable to Filipinos, almost half of whom live on less than $2 a day.