Power Of Suppliers : Supply Technology

The barrier to enter Biotechnology industry is high. The first barrier is the extensive requirements in funding coming from heavy expenditures in R&D, along with the risk of little to no returns or even heavy losses if the drug fails to reach the market. Regulatory environment partly contributes to the barrier as the new drug approval process can be time-consuming with relatively 89% of failure to pass through. The second barrier is specialization. Companies with knowledge in obscure diseases will enjoy low threat of new entrant for there are few experts in the field.

There is a growing threat from generic competition due to their global operations that can achieve lower-cost of supplies. Also the threat

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.

Many other drugs also lose patent protection leading to the creation of substitutes that are cheaper.

Economic: Globalization of the pharmaceutical industry is an exciting opportunity to have research and development done at cheaper prices in other countries. However, this could be a double edged sword for companies because it is easy for other countries, such as India, to produce generic versions of the drug in bulk.

Pharmaceutical companies are provided with temporary monopoly rights on the production of new drugs which result in a higher cost on consumers. If competing companies were allowed to produce generic forms of those drugs, consumers will be able to afford those medications even in cases where those consumers have no insurance coverage. The company responsible for developing and inventing the original medication could be offered incentives to invent in the future by either obtaining tax breaks or NIH funding for future research. They could even be offered a percentage of the sales of the generic drugs. Economist Gary S. Becker advocates dropping many FDA requirements that, in his opinion, provide no additional safety measures but rather delay the development of new drugs.[12] Betamethasone, for example, has been part of the standard prenatal care in Europe since the late 1970’s while it got adopted in the U.S. after 1997. On many occasions, the FDA ignores all scientific evidence concerning certain drugs because the manufacturer did not follow their mandated bureaucratic standards.

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

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

One added reason could be the current high number of mergers in the industry. Which in the long run leads to less competition, driving the innovation down and the prices up. In the United States, there are no regulatory efforts to stop the companies for charging so much. They are one of the only nations that believes in a free market for drug pricing. They are only one of two countries that allow direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. As of today the United States does not import drugs from

Extremely risky drug discovery and development, lengthening development times which increase development cost, return on investments, and generic competitors.

The high prices set by pharmaceutical companies for drugs allows the companies to continue researching, developing, and producing new drugs. As new diseases are discovered, new medications must be discovered in order to treat them.

* Barriers to Entry. A number of factors allow a pharmaceutical manufacturer to act as a

Recently, there has been a debate about the high prescription drug prices in the United States. Accounting for 9.7% of the national health expenditure, $329.2 billion was spent on prescription medications ($931 per person) in 2011 (Linton, 2014). So what exactly is the average American getting with their $931? Well, because there is an extraordinary amount of time, effort, and energy that goes into creating, manufacturing, and distributing a new drug, it’s no wonder the prices are so high. But what other costs are folded into the prices of your prescribed medications? This review looks beyond just the research and development costs needed to take a new drug from idea to shelf by examining several journals and other credible, secondary sources, to shed some light on how much pharmaceutical companies are spending to develop, advertise, and sell their drugs.

While this case is literally full of negative aspects, we will only focus on the main points for both arguments. Pharmaceutical companies want to be sure that the products they spend years and millions of dollars to create are not easily reproduced and sold at discount prices. The profits pharmaceuticals make of their patented products are supposed to refinance new research. So taking away their exclusive distribution rights and allowing other manufacturers to just copy the product and sell it at

In pharma industry the raw materials mainly consist of organic chemicals. The need of different organic chemicals depends on the chemical formulae of drug. Pharmaceutical industry depends on various different organic chemicals for the production of end drugs. The chemical industry itself is very competitive and also very fragmented because their products (organic chemicals) are standardized and steps to produce them are also standardized. The chemicals used in pharma industry are commodity as pharmaceutical companies do production on economies of scale to lower the cost. The suppliers have low bargaining power because companies can switch to a new supplier without incurring a high cost. But there is a threat from supplier if it decides to go for forward integration and become a pharma industry