Emergen dudas sobre paises emergentes....

BY HESTER PLUMRIDGE

Pharmaceutical groups are short on growth. Can emerging markets fill the gap? Faced with a wave of drug-patent expirations and with few new blockbuster drugs in the pipeline, companies are focusing their marketing efforts on the developing world, where healthcare spending has historically been far lower. Novartis and Roche already generate nearly 25% of sales from emerging markets. Merck hopes to achieve this by 2013 and AstraZeneca, by 2014. Generating emerging-market revenues is one thing, but turning them into profits is another.

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Practically everyone who's anyone in Big Pharma is going after fast-growing drug markets like India, Brazil, China and so on. The idea is that, as blockbuster drugs fall off patent in mature markets, drugmakers can churn up emerging-markets sales to make up the difference. And the numbers appear to back this up: As the WSJ notes, emerging markets drug sales are forecast to almost equal drug spending in the rest of the world by 2020.

But there are caveats. The big six emerging markets--Brazil, Russia, India, China, Mexico and Turkey--account for only half of emerging-markets sales. The rest is scattered among a host of countries, so to really take advantage of growth in the developing world, drugmakers will have to be in, well, a host of countries. And each country has its own culture, its own rules, and so on.

Not to mention the oft-repeated fact that margins are lots lower in emerging markets, partly because it takes big sales forces to get the word out about drugs for sale. As WSJ points out, GlaxoSmithKline's emerging-markets margins are about 36 percent, compared with 60 percent and 68 percent in the U.S. and Europe; AstraZeneca's are up to 30 percent lower in developing countries.

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The WSJ's conclusion? Sure, emerging markets may help Big Pharma grow over the next 10 years. But the growth isn't going to be nearly enough to make the drug industry the financial powerhouse it used to be. (Ver)