McKinsey: Llamada de atención para Big Pharma...

The good old days of the pharmaceutical industry are gone forever. Even an improved global economic climate is unlikely to halt efforts by the developed world’s governments to contain spending on drugs. Emerging markets will follow their lead and pursue further spending control measures. Regulatory requirements—particularly the linkage among the benefits, risks, and cost of products—will increase, while the industry pipeline shows little sign of delivering sufficient innovation to compensate for such pressures.

These factors suggest that the industry is heading toward a world where its profit margins will be substantially lower than they are today. This dramatic situation requires Big Pharma executives to envision responses that go well beyond simply tinkering with the cost base or falling back on mergers and acquisitions.1 A bolder, more radical approach to Big Pharma’s operating model must become a realistic planning scenario. While an immediate corrective response in the coming weeks and months may not be the answer, a purposeful strategy that provides for this change in the medium and longer term is necessary.

The case for difficult times ahead is straightforward. McKinsey analysis shows that over the years, real price increases, rewarding past innovation and changes in pathways for treating patients, have been the most significant driver of the pharma industry’s growth (Exhibit 1). Less attention has been paid to managing the cost base. The industry may have recently begun to focus on that, but its heart doesn’t seem to be in the effort, and it has little to show for these efforts.

The era now drawing to a close may have brought outstanding innovations to patients and profitability to Big Pharma, but the industry’s composition evolved considerably during this period, and not necessarily in favor of large companies (Exhibit 2). Conventional wisdom, perhaps fed by high-profile mergers, holds that the industry has consolidated.

But on the contrary, our analysis shows that it has become more fragmented: the number of companies competing for the profit pool has more than doubled (Exhibit 3). As a result of that fragmentation, Big Pharma must compete for parts of the value chain with focused players—for example, generics companies that excel at manufacturing; life-science service providers that offer flexible, specialized services (such as managing clinical trials) at scale; and biotechnology companies that generate innovative ideas and products.

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