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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (66529)	7/23/2005 9:29:11 AM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

What is the percentage of costs for a typical pharma company: Sales & marketing as a percentage of revenue Manufacturing as a percentage of revenue R&D as a percentage of revenue Cost of finding a unique medicine that others cannot make and market is going up. Have the Pharma companies raised their R&D? Or they are just copping out and creatively increasing the perceived value of their medicines by more advertizing. >"TECHNOLOGY IS MAKING MEDICINES DIRT CHEAP." If you mean manufacturing costs, that is certainly the trend. But the cost of developing a new effective medicine is now higher than ever.>

To: Seeker of Truth who wrote (66529)	7/23/2005 12:07:26 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Cost? "Novartis is spending around 33% of sales on promotion, compared with about 19% on R&D" "many of the basic discoveries that drug companies develop and profit from came from universities and government institutes in the first place." “The industry was living a little fat and happy,” says Sidney Taurel, Eli Lilly's boss. "Pfizer, the world's biggest drug firm, is famous for its marketing prowess (it makes Viagra), but in April it announced a $4 billion cost-cutting programme, some of which will fall on its 38,000-strong international sales and marketing machine. In America, the firm is cutting the number of reps detailing a product to the same doctor." Looks like deflation to Elmat. "the essential difficulty of bringing market forces into medicine. Health care does not work like a normal market, although there are ways of making it more market-like, such as shifting more purchasing power to patients and providing them with more information." "a third of the drugs launched on the market in the past few years were first or second “in class”. The rest were “me-too” medicines, tackling the same problem in much the same way as existing drugs."