Pharmaceutical Industry: A Promising Future

By Vijay K Shetty

High life expectancy and lower death rates are attributed to the valuable contributions by the Pharma Industry. The pharmaceutical industry is a constantly evolving one. It is an industry which has the highest amount of research and development activities as compared to other sectors of the industry. This industry develops, produces, and markets drugs licensed for use as medications to cure various kinds of illnesses. Pharmaceutical companies can deal in generic and/or brand medications.

This industry has to face a lot of rules, regulations and abide by numerous laws related to patenting testing and marketing of drugs. The use of internet promoted consumerism since direct purchase of drugs by consumers, etc was easily possible. Also, the increased advertising in electronic media gave this industry the much needed boost.

As mentioned earlier, this industry relies heavily on research and development, and incurs unfathomable costs for the same. Despite these, due to the criticality of the issue, which involves the lives of millions, this involves deep scrutiny, and hence, every year, only about 25 drugs are approved for marketing.

The United States accounts for almost half of the global pharmaceutical market and this industry has been one of the most profitable of all businesses. Recently, the pharmaceutical industry topped the list of most profitable industries, with a 17% return on revenue.

The largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies ranked by healthcare surveys are Novartis, Pfizer, Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline. The term Big Pharma is used for such companies whose revenue exceeds $3 billion. Because this industry involves huge costs, they can apply for patent rights to protect their inventions.

The most important players in this industry are physicians, assistants, and nurses because they are the ones on whose prescription depends the life of patients.

In India, this is the most organized sector and plays an important role in sustaining development in the field of global medicine. Due to the presence of low cost manufacturing facilities, educated and skilled manpower and cheap labour force, the industry can reach great heights in production, manufacturing, research and development. It is expected to increase at an annual growth rate of 9.9%. Some interesting facts are that this industry grows at about 1.5 times the GDP. Globally, an India rank 3rd in terms of volume of manufacturing pharmaceuticals, and the retail pharma market is expected to cross $12 billion by 2012. The key players in the Indian market are Ranbaxy, Dr. Reddy's, Cipla, etc.

The Pharma Industry is highly lucrative and offers huge growth opportunities, since a lot of initiatives are taken by the Government to support this industry. The wake of investments gives a promising future to the pharmaceutical industry. It has tremendous potential for growth and there are several upcoming projects with tie-up companies, both in the domestic and global market.

Vijay K Shetty,