Cracking The Generic Code---Your Single-Source Success Manual for Winning in Multi-Source Product Markets!

The global pharmaceutical industry, which touches the lives of every human being, continues to be polarized with the great triad (North America, Europe, and Japan), accounting for about two-thirds of the total in value even today. The winds of radical change that is affecting the world are also affecting the pharmaceutical industry. Declining R&D productivity, vanishing exclusivities due to increasing patent expiries, determined governments of virtually every country on earth to contain the spiraling healthcare costs are driving rapid genericization of the pharmaceutical industry. Consequently, the great divide between the big Pharma and the copycat generic companies is blurring. What was once upon a time unthinkable for a me-too generic company suddenly started looking plausible and possible! The little Davids are taking on the big Goliaths of the pharmaceutical industry with their paratroopers’ Paragraph IV and patent challenges. The Goliaths, too, are planning counteroffensive strategies such as authorized generics and patent extension, among others. The chapter on Turf Wars presents a detailed account of the skirmishes, battles, and even wars between the big pharma and the generics companies. These are most certainly the most challenging and yet exciting times for Pharma. All these significant changes are also creating new opportunities in their wake, deconstructing the old business models giving rise to new. The new competitive spaces can broadly be classified into innovation-led, International Generics, and CRAMS. These are not separate watertight competitive spaces. They are relatively seamless. It is as though the revered vertical integration model is turned into a modular model with a provision of ‘join-the-pieces-when-you-can’ modules. These modules are separate and yet are meshed closely, facilitating a continuous flow. It is a recombinant business model wherein you build your corporate genome adding, modifying your capability genes. The global generic drug industry is robust and growing. Of more than two thousand generic drug firms globally, only five companies — Mylan, Teva, Sandoz, Pfizer (General and Established Products) Generics division, and Sun have a truly global presence. Why is it that only five out of the many generic drug companies are global, and the rest are not? What are the success secrets of these companies? Do they have a separate Success DNA? A Secret Sauce? A Code for winning in the global generic drug markets? Can any of the other companies become global? Cracking the Generics code unravels the mystery of the DNA for success in the international generic drug markets. The key to the generics code is a synthesis of insights gained from a detailed study of twenty leading players. A detailed analysis of these twenty companies reveals the success code of ‘Ten essential elements of a winning strategy.’ The book presents insights gleaned and gained from the game-plans employed by these twenty highly successful companies in a sustained-release capsule form. The game-plans of these companies reflect this spirit of success, optimism, and confidence. The ten essential strategic elements of these winning gameplans are discussed in ten separate chapters. These are: 1. Strategic Vision 2. Reaching the Critical Mass 3. Marketing Mindset 4. Technology Focus 5. Focusing on Research 6. Intellectual Capital 7. Integrating Strategically 8. Internationalizing the Business 9. Attracting Alliances 10. Operational Excellence These twenty companies’ strategies provide invaluable lessons for the discerning reader, whether he is an executive who is shaping his company’s future, or an analyst studying and measuring the corporate performance, or a management student in pursuit of understanding how companies achieve superior sustainable performance. Cracking the Generics Code presents the continuing adventure story of about twenty international generic pharmaceutical companies from different geographies such as the US, Germany, Japan, China, India, and Jordan that are hell-bent on becoming competitive and staying competitive in Pharma’s globalized world. While these players originate from different geographical regions of the world, the principles of their strategy and their business processes towards the adaptation of change are universally applicable and, therefore, replicable. (viii) | Preface Cracking the Generics Code, therefore, offers valuable insights in terms of what needs to be done, and more importantly, how it can be done to achieve a higher degree of competitiveness in the brave new world of globalized Pharma by showing how a bunch of never-say-die companies is doing it successfully in some parts of the globe. In sum, Cracking the Generics Code is your single-source success manual for winning at multi-source (generic drugs) product markets!