Foreign Drug Firms Will Bear Burden Of Juppe Plan

In France, the deadline for payment of the "exceptional contribution" of about 2.5 billion French francs ($495 million) by the pharmaceutical industry towards reducing the health service deficit (Marketletters passim) has now passed, and it appears the individual shares of foreign companies towards this global amount will have been greater than that of the French-owned drug groups.

The main contributors in ranking order, according to industrial consultancies and other sources, are Smith-Kline Beecham (UK), Rhone-Poulenc Rorer (which is in fact a Franco-American firm), Roussel-Uclaf (a Franco-German company), Bristol-Myers Squibb (USA), and the French companies Sanofi and Synthelabo.

The reason given by most analysts for the discrepancy between the size of the contributions paid by individual companies and their share of the drug market is that growth in some foreign-owned companies has been much stronger than in the French firms; the example of Sweden's Astra is cited with its antiulcer agent Mopral (omeprazole).