The Freshness Index

One way to look at a drug company's pipeline and portfolio is the "Freshness Index" - how much of its sales are coming from products approved within the past five years. Here's Bernard Munos earlier this year on this topic, where he shows that (too much) revenue lately has been coming from older products. At the time, the figures for the big companies started off with Novartis (19% "fresh" sales), GlaxoSmithKline (12%), J&J (11.8%) and Pfizer (10%). I bring this up because there's a new look at the freshness index. This one has only products from 2010 or later, and year-to-date sales figures. Under those conditions, it's J&J in the lead (23.4% of sales), then Novartis (17.8%), and Novo Nordisk (13.6%). Now, Novo was not in Munos's list, so I can't say if there's been much of a change there or not, but I find the change in J&J's figures interesting. I don't think that's all due to new approvals - is it older stuff slipping off the list? The new list also has GSK down neat the bottom at 2.3% "fresh", which shows you how much the cutoffs matter to these assessments. One thing both lists agree on, though, is Eli Lilly. They're at the bottom in both, showing 0.8% of their sales coming from anything approved since 2010. That can't be good, and it isn't. AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Merck, and Sanofi are all in the single digits as well. So's Roche, but their long-running Genentech-driven biotech products make up for that. AZ and Lilly don't exactly have that cushion.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs