Nearly all of the companies already published their 2015 financial results. Performances varied widely and some clearly outperformed others as in any industry.

The 2015 best company is Gilead: what an amazing performance! In less than 2 years, it reached the Top 15 Pharma companies. More than USD 19 billion of sales had been generated from Harvoni and Sovaldi, both disruptive drugs against hepatitis C. 58% of 2015 sales came from those 2 products. Diversification will be the next challenge for the company.

The table below summarizes the main financial data points for 2015:

Teva has not yet published its results at the time of my post. I’ll update it later on.

*For Takeda, the company released only its 9-month results and for comparison purposes I extrapolated the 9-month into a 12-month period.

After populating the table, 2 aggregates have been computed:

• Total sales in 2015 from Top 15 Pharma companies: USD 487 billion
• Total R&D expenditures in 2015 from Top 15 companies: USD 82.5 billion

All in all, the big names of the industry spent close to 17% of their sales in research and development.

When we look at the 4th column in the table, year over year growth in constant currencies is between 0 and 8% apart for 2-3 companies like AbbVie (linked to the Pharmacyclics acquisition in May 2015), Bristol-Myers Squibb and Lilly.

Generally speaking, the pharmaceutical industry is still a cash-rich and good performing industry. More challenges will probably come from pricing pressures around the world (and this time not only Europe or Japan, but also from the USA).

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