Company Data - Research Paper Example

79). Take Pfizer, one of the top ten largest drug suppliers in the world that belongs to big pharma. It is considered to be the most profitable as it ranked number one in the worldwide sales on drugs designated as prescription (Clinton & Mozeson, 2010, p. 70). The company is also the highest spender in terms of research and development (R&D), and in merger and acquisition activities. However, some surprising facts have been discovered during the Pharm Exec’s industry audit and Stealth pharma audit.

The main focus of this paper is to review pharmaceutical company data between the audit of stealth pharma and big pharma such as Pfizer. After the gathering of data, surprising facts will be gathered and developed analyses. Company Data Pharmaceutical companies decided to venture in other parts of the world because of higher opportunity and promised benefits that would surely outweigh the difficulty of globalization. Japan, Western Europe, and North America are among the countries in the world that are high in pharmaceutical sales (Campbell, 2008, p. 16). The current trend of pharmaceutical companies nowadays is merger and acquisition which is not only practiced by big pharma but also to stealth pharma in order for them to expand their sales, market capitalization, and market share.

Pfizer is one of the big pharmas that acquired several companies for the past ten years. For the year 2001, it acquired its direct competitor Warner-Lambert for $90 billion, and by 2003 the company decided to merge with Pharmacia for $60 billion in order to reduce its R&D cost (Lawson, Hatch, & Desroches, 2008, p. 157). Recently, the company has acquired Wyeth for $68 billion; this is to back up the company’s dropping of revenue caused by patent expiration and portfolio diversification (“Pfizer,” 2009).

More companies believed that through pharmerging, their market share would increase as competition has been reduced for companies that merged and acquired are direct competitors in the market. On the other hand, it has been manifested that big pharma’s expenses on R&D (approximately $304 billion) are much higher compared to the disbursement of stealth pharma which is only $157 million (Trombetta, 2007). From this point of view, it is expected that big pharma would gain higher revenues in comparison to the anticipation of stealth pharma.

Usually, large pharmaceutical companies in America are required to spend more on R&D as part of government regulations in exchange with the granting of patent and trademarks that give the company an exclusive right to manufacture and sell the drugs. For instance, “Pfizer spent almost $7.6 billion on R&D for drugs and slightly over $2 billion on plants and equipments” and in exchange, the company’s drugs are under the U.S. patent protection (Siegel, 2008, p. 109). Three Surprising Facts A professor from Harvard Business School, Gary Pisano said that, “The record of big mergers and acquisitions in big pharma has not just been good.

There’s just been an enormous amount of shareholder wealth destroyed” (as cited in Karnitschnig & Rockoff, 2009). It had been a surprised fact that merging among stealth pharma had been successful considering that biotechnology companies have increased in numbers and they have managed to be at the top twenty firms. It had been interesting to discover that