Industry Analysis & Industry Trends
Once a beneficiary of strong industry growth drivers that fuelled successive decades of growth, the Global Pharmaceutical and Medicine Manufacturing industry is now undergoing a considerable degree of change as extraneous variables continue to affect the industry's operating environment. Intensifying competitive pressures, increasingly pervasive pricing controls, tighter regulatory controls and declining R&D productivity have all served to restrain industry growth in recent times. In addition, the continued loss of exclusivity in major therapy areas, combined with greater levels of therapeutic substitution, heightened safety concerns and increasingly aggressive litigation, have also become key features of the industry... read more
Industry Products
The Global Pharmaceuticals and Medicine Manufacturing industry consists of two tiers: the large pharmaceutical companies, which tend to be research-intensive, produce patented prescription products and operate on a global scale with annual sales in excess of $3 billion; and the smaller players, which operate on a more limited national or regional scale and produce generic or over-the-counter (OTC) medicines geared toward the local market.
Thus the global industry can essentially be divided between prescription based (branded and generic) and over-the-counter (OTC) medications with the former thought to account for roughly 65% of all worldwide pharmaceutical sales. In addition there is a third (albeit very small) product segment, complementary medicines... read more