critically evaluate the commercial environment of schering pharmaceutical company

The Commercial Environment of Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical Company

The U .S . drug market where Schering-Plough is headquartered and operating from has a big number of companies that are engaged in pharmaceutical business and millions of people depend on the drugs these companies bring into the market , a process that has a very high price tag and a time span of more than a decade , coupled with a lukewarm success rate since very few of the drugs that had been under research would find their way into the market . The number of diseases and the

br number of drugs that are coming into existence to tackle them are big in number . [1] The amount of money spent on prescription drugs on 2002 was 160 billion revealing what kind of a huge market it is . To make things worse the price of prescription drugs had been spiralling at an alarming rate forcing both public and private purchasers to demand some kind of price controlling measures . [2]

But when seen from the general health care spending perspective who take the most portion of the expenditures are hospitals and physician services that cost 31 and 22 of the while prescriptions drugs share is only 11 of the spending . But when taking into consideration the kind of growth that took place in the year 2002 the prescription drug sector grew 15 .3 compared to 9 .5 for hospitals and 7 .7 for physicians , which shows there is something behind the spiralling cost of drugs that is forcing everyone to go up in arms to bring it into some kind of control , because this trend is believed to continue for the next ten years . Everyone had scrambled to find out the reason and some factors that are suspected to feed into the spiralling cost were the increasing number of senior citizens , the high number of new drug introductions into the market place with an expensive price tag , how the manufacturers are marketing their products or the high awareness level of the of the consumers might also have something to do with the cost . Even if there was an assumption that the coming into the picture of generic drugs and the introduction of fewer drugs were expected to dampen the price in reality , the U .S . prescription drugs increased by 11 .5 to 216 .4 billion for the year 2003 defying any speculation . What can be assessed from such a performance is the U .S . prescription drug industry is highly profitable even if the accounting method used might not revel the exact cost and revenue relationship simply because the industry is allowed to add any cost it incurs in R D , which would make things complicated since close 70-80 of the cost of the industry is R D . [3]

A comparison among prescription drug manufacturers had been made in the year 2002 and the top ten ranked companies had 59 .6 of the market share , which shows there are others too that have a share . That will bring us...