Comparative Analysis and Benchmarking

Abstract

This research of corporate strategy analysis implements comparative analysis and benchmarking to analyse and examine the corporate strategy of the pharmaceutical sectors of 4 international pharmaceutical companies.

Most existing studies of pharmaceutical industry have been limited to some specific fields such as the R&D ability, new products launch time, acquisitions, and alliances. Little has been known about the analysis of corporate strategy and comparison of pharmaceutical industry by both internal and external factors. On the other hand, the comparative strategy and benchmarking have been frequently applied in analysing the corporate strategy mostly in public service industries, in financial and accounting industry, and in insurance industry. Little has been applied to examine and analyse the corporate strategy of research-based industries such as pharmaceutical industry. This research aims to fill the gap by implementing these two techniques to analyse and examine the corporate strategies of 4 research based pharmaceutical companies.

This research adopts the hybrid approach of combining qualitative and quantitative methods in a two stages research design. Quantitative method is applied first to deal with the comparative figures, and then qualitative method is used to find out the problem. The design of this multiple research includes three phases: data collection, analysis, and reporting.

The findings of this research can be divided into 4 parts: R&D/marketing, technology alliances, strategic acquisitions and merger, and manufacturing. The drug innovative projects are recommended being developed within the company's familiar therapeutic areas in order to take its marketing advantage. Through this comparative analysis, some of this type of problems of these international pharmaceutical companies is identified. A big pharmaceutical company forming alliances with some small biotechnology companies has become a trend within pharmaceutical industry since 1980s. For pharmaceutical companies, to take advantage of R&D through biotechnology is the main purpose of alliances with small biotechnology companies. It is important to note that most pharmaceutical acquisitions belong to the type of absorption with high resource transferring and low autonomy. Due to the high profit margin and the essential importance of R&D and marketing, the operation management of manufacturing of pharmaceutical industry is relatively poor. The low asset utilisation rate pointed out this problem. Academic researches have revealed that existing theories of operation management of manufacturing, such as action research, set-up reduction, teamwork, continuous improvement, collaboration, and involvement, are applicable and beneficial to pharmaceutical industry rather than waiting for the technology breakthroughs.

About the Author

2003 PhD in Marketing, Manchester School of Management, UMIST 1998 MSc in EBM, Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick 1995-1997 Pharmacy manager, The 817 Military Hospital, Taipei 1995 BSc in Pharmacy, School of Pharmacy, Taipei Medical University 1994 Intern pharmacist, Taipei Veterans General Hospital Nov 1972 Born in Taipei