Pharmaceutical Company

This page shows you how to write a business research paper on a pharmaceutical company. The project will analyze the company from the marketing point of view. Research paper on an analysis on a particular pharmaceutical company should include much of what you see here on this page, such as:

• How your chosen pharmaceutical company incorporates game theory
• Production and costs
• Deals with competitive markets
• Incentive contracts and pricing
• Market power

While many elements have contributed to the industry's success, most analysts identify the chief proponent to be the pharmaceutical companies' increasingly savvy use of marketing techniques. However, in recent years, pharmaceutical companies have begun aggressively to apply conventional marketing strategies to their own processes of product development, branding, and advertising. The result has been a sea change in the industry, most visible in the pervasive reordering of expenditures among major pharmaceutical companies.

The pharmaceutical industry is involved with the development, production and distribution of pharmaceutical products on a global basis. The industry attempts to meet a fundamental customer need of improved health at the same time that it attempts to produce value for its shareholders. At the same time, the industry has entrepreneurial aspects that encourage innovation in all areas or operations while placing a high value on knowledge assets. It is for these reasons that I would like to be employed by the industry.

The pharmaceutical industry has engaged in a gradual process of globalization throughout the second half of the twentieth century, with the process accelerating in the last decade. The industry now has production and distribution facilities located in all regions, with location of facilities determined by market demand and regulatory factors that vary significantly among regions. Pharmaceutical sales have enjoyed an annual growth rate of approximately 10% in the past decade. The data regarding the actual sales of the industry is somewhat variable, but there is general agreement that it is likely to be above $400 billion a year at the current time.

Global Pharmaceutical Consumption Rates

The global pharmaceutical industry is highly concentrated with the top ten companies controlling approximately 60% of the global market share. Pfizer is the largest firm, with sales of approximately $52 billion. It is followed by Johnson & Johnson with sales of $46 billion, Glaxo Smith Kline with sales of $37 billion and Bayer with sales of $36 billion. Other major firms in order of sales volume are Novartis, Merck, Bristol-Myer Squibb, Wyeth and Lilly. The competitive environment in the industry is shaped by the research and development effort that produces new drugs. Some of these new drugs may provide better outcomes than existing pharmaceuticals, which tends to intensify competition with the firm producing the original drug that has been superseded. Each of the major firms, however, has some proprietary drugs that are not in direct competition with the products produced by other major firms. The competitive environment in the industry is also shaped by the availability of generic drugs and the difficulties that the major firms have in protecting patents in developing nations that do not have strong patent protection policies. In practice, many drugs that are available in industrialized nations are not produced in developing nations due to weak patent protections.

The application of information technologies (IT) to the industry over the past decade has resulted in a restructuring of the industry through the use of IT to shorten development to market cycle times and to improve marketing. There have been year to year increases in information technology spending, but there is no available industry wide data regarding the spending levels relative to gross sales. The primary application of the IT is in supply chain management, which in the context of the industry focuses heavily on the development of new drugs with the actual cost of production a relatively small factor in operations management. As a result, IT is used to automate the process of drug discovery in order to accelerate the development of new chemicals with therapeutic qualities.

Chain Description and Discussion of Pharmaceutical Supply and Demand

The definition of supply chain that focuses on the network arrangements of the chain as it evolves from supply and demand considerations. The demand from the customer exerts a demand pull on the primary supplier of goods and services that in turn exert a demand pull on the suppliers of goods and services that are necessary for the final product. As a result a network develops to support the throughput, with the downstream suppliers in a hub-and-spoke arrangement with the producing firm. Another definition of supply chain is a seamless link that allows closer connections between the customer and the sources of supply for goods and services, with the firm acting as a facilitator of the throughput process (Hochtor & Thierauf, 2003). This definition recognizes the role of IT in the effectiveness of the supply chain. These two definitions do not address the autonomy of the participants in the supply chain, which is part of the traditional definition. In some industries, the autonomy of the members of the supply chain may be eroding because of the characteristics of the global business environment in which supply chains rather than individual firms are increasingly competing with each other. As a result, the definition that will be used in this study is as follows: an e-supply chain consists of a network of semi-autonomous firms that form an organization with characteristics of a strategic partnership in order to respond to customer demand.