Design Company Novartis Hellas Pharmaceuticals Firms

There are multiple health concerns worldwide and more and more drugs are needed every day. Many drugs however, are extremely expensive to develop, test, and produce. According to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (2002), it costs up to $802 million to bring a new drug to the market. In 2002, pharmaceutical companies spent $34 billion in research and development (Center-Watch, 2003). In addition to the costs, the overall time from the discovery to approve and market the drug can take up to 15 years.

Porter’s Five Forces is a framework that consists of five competitive forces, threat of entry, power of supplier and buyer, threat of substitution and competitive rivalry. These forces facilitate the analysis of the task environment of an industry or company (Wheelen and Hunger, 2009).

The barriers a Business must deal with, such as competitors, substitutes, customers, supplier, etc are often referred to as:

Improvements in health care and life sciences are an important source of gains in health and longevity globally. The development of innovative pharmaceutical products plays a critical role in ensuring these continued gains. To encourage the continued development of new drugs, economic incentives are essential. These incentives are principally provided through direct and indirect government funding, intellectual property laws, and other policies that favor innovation. Without such incentives, private corporations, which bring to market the vast majority of new drugs, would be less able to assume the risks and costs necessary to continue their research and development (R&D). In the United States, government action has focused on creating the environment that would best encourage further innovation and yield a constant flow of new and innovative medicines to the market. The goal has been to ensure that consumers would benefit both from technological breakthroughs and the competition that further innovation generates. The United States also relies on a strong generic pharmaceutical industry to create added competitive pressure to lower drug prices. Recent action by the Administration and Congress has accelerated the flow of generic medicines to the market for precisely that reason. By contrast, in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and

2. Patent related and Generic Competition: The developed countries like US and Europe have strong patent protection laws which gives a lot of benefits for the pharmaceutical companies. But, the patent

U.S. based companies hold rights to most of the world’s rights on new medicines and holds thousands of new products currently being developed. As of 2012, the industry helps support almost 3.4 million jobs in the U.S. economy. It is also one of the most heavily R&D based industries in the world. In the United States, the environment for pharmaceuticals is much friendlier than other countries around the world in terms of pricing ability and regulations. Both the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology industries have experienced significant growth in the past year with year-over-year increases of 13.02% and 34.69% respectively. It is an even more striking when looking at the past five years considering both have beat out the S&P 500 with pharmaceuticals increasing an additional 31.44% and the biotechnology sector besting an astonishing 269.3% more return than the

equilibrium. The new company is now run as a monopoly, and this paper shall explain

Porter's Five Forces is a simple but powerful tool that consist of 5 different forces to understand the competitiveness of your business environment, and for identifying your strategy's potential profitability. The five forces are degree of rivalry, threat of entry, threat of substitutions, buyer power, and supplier power. Each force is helpful in their own way to get to know your rivals a lot better and get to know what can happen in your market.

Technical risk, a large portion of all development costs are spent on drugs that never reach the market.

The second rests in Pfizer’s expiring patents on several popular drugs that invite their competitors to enter the market with similarly performing pharmaceuticals. Once these patents expire, Pfizer will either have to extend the patent through reformulating the performance of the drug for another purpose called “ever greening”, or abandon the line in the pursuit of another, more profitable product. Regardless of what they do in terms of their own product offerings, generic imitations of their products will enter the market, diluting the profitability of the drug and forcing reliance on the sales of other existing products to make up the loss.

2. What is your assessment of the pharmaceutical industry at the time of the case? How is competition changing? What factors are driving

We analyzed the Indian Pharmaceutical industry on these five forces and the findings of industry competitiveness and profitability are written under the relevant competitive forces.

The Porter Five forces analysis is a structure for business management developed by Michael Porter in 1979. It uses concepts developed in Industrial Organization economics to derive five forces that determine the attractiveness of a market. Porter referred to these forces as the microenvironment, to contrast it with the more general term microenvironment. They consist of those forces close to a company that affect its ability to serve its customers and make a profit. This concept involves a relationship between competitors within an industry, potential competitors, suppliers, buyers and alternative solutions to the problem being addressed. A change in any of the forces normally requires a company to re-assess the marketplace.

First, it takes an extremely long time to develop a new drug, and only a very small portion of all projects is successful. Projects that the company starts today will determine its financial performance 10-15 years later. Therefore, careful planning of R&D projects is very important for the long-term stability of the company.

Porter’s 5 Forces analysis is a commonly used business theory that identifies the 5 competitive forces of an industry. By identifying and analysing these forces you can determine an industries weaknesses and strengths. Porter recognised the 5 forces in most business markets to be internal rivalry, entry, substitutes and compliments, supplier power and buyer power.