Our rules for inclusion on the Top 10 Biopharma list are as follows: you’re a biopharma company if more than half of your drug revenues — not royalties — come from large-molecule drugs and vaccines. It’s arbitrary, but it’s worked pretty well for the past decade. This year, it means that Roche/Genentech has become the world’s #1 biopharma, marking the first change at the top in 10 years
The rest of this year’s list is consistent with the previous year’s ranks, which is both a sign of the stability among biopharmas and a sign of the difficulty in commercializing new biologics without a major partner.
Several of the Top 10 are legit takeover targets, but no buyout deal is likely to close before the end of the year, so the biggest opportunity for a change is between the 7 and 8 spots, if Genzyme’s production woes cause enough of a revenue drop to allow CSL to slip by.
10th anniversary note: in our first edition, Amgen was tops with biopharma revenues of $3.2 billion. There are now eight companies with revenues higher than that!
—Gil Y. Roth, Editor
Source
www.contractpharma.com