The Strength Foreign Powers

Despite what most Americans might believe, the US is not the biggest and best at everything.  This oft overlooked fact by most citizens of the good ol' US of A should not be taken lightly by investors, especially if they are looking to invest in pharmaceuticals.  There are foreign powers at work within the pharmaceutical industry, and unless you've lived in their home countries (or frequently investigate the pharmaceutical markets) then you probably haven't heard of them.  They hold huge amounts of the global market, and provide us with some of our most prescribed drugs, yet we wouldn't even recognize their names.  So let's shed a little bit of light on these unknowns, shall we?  Perhaps, as with most things, us Americans can let go of our ethnocentricity if we gain a little knowledge and familiarity with what may, at first appear as scary unknowns.

Let's begin with the least intimidating of the unknowns first by beginning with our old mother country, the UK, and more specifically England.  The main player in this particular region is the giant GlaxoSmithKline.  This Brentford based company rakes in 46,000 million dollars per year and has almost 100,000 employees.  They produce more than 25 different kinds of vaccines every year, and more significantly to citizens of the US, they also manufacture many of the brands we see in the grocery store or pharmacy as over-the-counter medications like Aquafresh, Breathe Right, Sensodyne, Nicorette, and Alli.  The second most profitable drug in the world, Advair, is under the GSK name as well.  Every American has probably seen advertisements for a GSK brand then, even if we didn't know it.  There's another UK based company that has pulled the same man-behind-the-curtain act as GlaxoSmithKline - AstraZeneca.  With its headquarters in London, but with a reach well beyond the borders of that particular region, AstraZeneca is a name that citizens of the US should swiftly gain familiarity with.  They produce Crestor, one of the most prescribed medications for high cholesterol in the world, not to mention their very popular acid reflux fighter, Nexium.  AstraZeneca has a revenue of over 33,000 million dollars per year, and that, combined with the impact of their medications on many lives in the US is not to be ignored.  If our cousins across the sea have that much influence on the drugs we consume every day, then other international corporations can't hold too much sway, right?  To be blunt, no.  In fact, an even larger corporations has close ties with AstraZeneca through a recent acquisition of its strategic alliance partner, Alcon.

That company is Novartis, which headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.  The organization has a huge revenue of over 50,000 million dollars per year, and the company employs almost 120,000 people world wide, making it the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world.  The firm develops generic, over-the-counter medication, animal health products, and the contact lens category of CIBA vision, and seems to eat up almost any companies which might prove to make it more profitable.  For such a large business, Novartis remains largely unknown in the US, perhaps even more unknown than the UK based companies mentioned above, even though its revenue accounts for more than 6% of the world's pharmaceutical revenue stream.

One last company bears mention in a global look at the pharmaceutical industry, if only for its peculiar stance toward the market itself.  That company is the Japanese based Takeda.  Although the firms income of 15,000 million dollars per year pales in comparison to some of the super corporations talked over earlier, there is something that elevates Takeda above the other firms, at least in my mind.  Takeda's whole business model is based on ethics.  Their primary goal is to swiftly reach the people who need their medication and to ensure the fair treatment of those people.  That truly is a remarkable approach to an industry in which most companies simply compete to win a greater share of the market.

Are the foreign powers so scary that we shouldn't become aware of them?  It depends on how much ignorance one views to be the definition of bliss.  If you don't want to think about how much influence corporate execs in the UK, Switzerland, and Japan have over the lives of so many Americans then the information you just read may indeed be truly frightening.  But, if one conquers the assumption that foreignness should create trepidation and familiarizes oneself with the foreign powers at work within the pharmaceutical industry, hidden gems that represent hope for the ethical treatment of consumers, like Takeda, can become part of our understanding.  We should all strive to learn more about companies that treat our ills and sometimes save our lives, especially when most don't go all out to show off their corporate slogans of competition through innovation, not of patient care and responsibility.

-Spencer Swan

Information for this article was acquired from:

Ranking of the Biggest Pharma Companies:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/287269-the-50-largest-pharmaceutical-companies-by-sales

Novartis: Basel, Switzerland

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BCRC?vrsn=unknown&locID=wash11212&srchtp=glbc&cc=1&c=1&mode=c&ste=60&tab=1&tbst=tsCM&ccmp=Novartis+AG&mst=novartis&docNum=DC118&bConts=3

GlaxoSmithKline: Brentford, UK http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BCRC?vrsn=unknown&locID=wash11212&srchtp=glbc&cc=1&c=1&mode=c&ste=60&tab=1&tbst=tsCM&ccmp=GlaxoSmithKline+PLC&mst=glaxosmithkline&docNum=DC806231&bConts=3

AstraZeneca: London, UK

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BCRC?vrsn=unknown&locID=wash11212&srchtp=glbc&cc=1&c=1&mode=c&ste=60&tab=1&tbst=tsCM&ccmp=AstraZeneca+PLC&mst=astrazeneca&docNum=DC519654&bConts=3

Takeda: Osaka, Japan

http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BCRC?vrsn=unknown&locID=wash11212&srchtp=glbc&cc=1&c=1&mode=c&ste=60&tab=1&tbst=tsCM&ccmp=Takeda+Pharmaceutical+Company+Ltd.&mst=takeda&docNum=DC218&bConts=3