How much does Big Pharma spend on R&D, compared to what it takes in? This topic came up during a discussion here last week, when a recent article at The Atlantic referred to these expenditures as "only" 16 cents on the dollar, and I want...
How much does Big Pharma spend on R&D, compared to what it takes in? This topic came up during a discussion here last week, when a recent article at The Atlantic referred to these expenditures as "only" 16 cents on the dollar, and I wanted to return to it.
One good source for such numbers is Booz, the huge consulting outfit, and their annual "Global Innovation 1000" survey. This is meant to be a comparison of companies that are actually trying to discover new products and bring them to market (as opposed to department stores, manufacturers of house-brand cat food, and other businesses whose operations consist of doing pretty much the same thing without much of an R&D budget). Even among these 1000 companies, the average R&D budget, as a per cent of sales, is between 1 and 1.5%, and has stayed in that range for years.
Different industries naturally have different averages. The "chemicals and energy" category in the Booz survey spends between 1 and 3% of its sales on R&D. Aerospace and defense companies tend to spend between 3 and 6 per cent. The big auto makers tend to spend between 3 and 7% of their sales on research, but those sales figures are so large that they still account for a reasonable hunk (16%) of all R&D expenditures. That pie, though, has two very large slices representing electronics/computers/semiconductors and biopharma/medical devices/diagnostics. Those two groups account for half of all the industrial R&D spending in the world.
And there are a lot of variations inside those industries as well. Apple, for example, spends only 2.2% of its sales on R&D, while Samsung and IBM come in around 6%. By comparison with another flagship high-tech sector, the internet-based companies, Amazon spends just over 6% itself, and Google is at a robust 13.6% of its sales. Microsoft is at 13% itself.
The semiconductor companies are where the money really gets plowed back into the labs, though. Here's a roundup of 2011 spending, where you can see a company like Intel, with forty billion dollars of sales, still putting 17% of that back into R&D. And the smaller firms are (as you might expect) doing even more. AMD spends 22% of its sales on R&D, and Broadcom spends 28%. These are people who, like Alice's Red Queen, have to run as fast as they can if they even want to stay in the same place.
Now we come to the drug industry. The first thing to note is that some of its biggest companies already have their spending set at Intel levels or above: Roche is over 19%, Merck is over 17%, and AstraZeneca is over 16%. The others are no slouches, either: Sanofi and GSK are above 14%, and Pfizer (with the biggest R&D spending drop of all the big pharma outfits, I should add) is at 13.5%. They, J&J, and Abbott drag the average down by only spending in the 11-to-14% range - I don't think that there's such a thing as a drug discovery company that spends in the single digits compared to revenue. If any of us tried to get away with Apple's R&D spending levels, we'd be eaten alive.
All this adds up to a lot: if you take the top 20 biggest industrial R&D spenders in the world, eight of them are drug companies. No other industrial sector has that many on the list, and a number of companies just missed making it. Lilly, for one, spent 23% of revenues on R&D, and BMS spend 22%, as did Biogen.
And those are the big companies. As with the chip makers, the smaller outfits have to push harder. Where I work, we spent about 50% of our revenues on R&D last year, and that's projected to go up. I think you'll find similar figures throughout biopharma. So you can see why I find it sort of puzzling that someone can complain about the drug industry as a whole "only" spending 16% of its revenues. Outside of semiconductors, nobody spends more
