Top Fifteen Pharmaceutical Companies in the World

Last week, I posted a list of top ten pesticides manufacturer of the world. One of my readers suggested I post a similar list for drug firms having been a former FDA employee. Yes, indeed as former FDA employee involved in the approval of new drugs, the subject of pharmaceutical firms, doing well really interest me. There was a report in Forbes Magazine by Mathew Herper( 2012) listing the top 15 best pharmaceutical firms based on the number of new drugs ( new chemical entity -NCE) approved by FDA. NCE is a drug that contains no active moiety that has been approved by the FDA in any other application submitted under section 505(b) of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

The list is as follow with reference noted below.

Table 1:Top 15 Firms Based on New Drugs Approved for the past 15 Years

Company - Number of New Drugs
Novartis 17
Merck&Co 16
J&J 15
Pfizer 14
Wyeth 13
Bristol-Myers 11
Hoffmann/Roche 11
Lilly 11
GlaxoSmithKline 10
Abbott 9
Amgen 9
Pharmacia/Upjohn 9

Source: Bernard Munos, InnoThink Center for Research in Biomedical Innovation

On the other hand the top ten pharmaceutical firms based on Dollars sales for 2012 is as follows:

Table 2: Special Report: Top Pharma Companies by 2012 Revenues-Billion of Dollars *
1 Johnson & Johnson- 67.2
2 Pfizer- 58.9
3 Novartis- 56.7
4 Roche- 47.8
5 Merck- 47.2
6 Sanofi- 46.4
7 GlaxoSmithKline- 39.9
8 Abbott Laboratories/AbbVie- 37.8
9 AstraZeneca - 27.9
10 Bayer HealthCare- 24.3

*Reference: Pfizer - FiercePharma http://www.fiercepharma.com/special-reports/pfizer

Note: Based on the two tables above, four firms are confirmed not only to be innovative but also profitable. The firms are J&J, Novartis, Merck and Pfizer. Wyeth and Roche made it to the top five firms for Table 1 and 2 respectively.