GLOBAL MARKETS AND FACTORS FOR SUCCESS

As the geographical borders between pharmaceutical markets begin to disappear, so do the differences among the critical success factors for US-based versus European-based companies, according to William Parfet, president of the Upjohn Company.

He told the Financial Times/Coopers & Lybrand World Pharmaceuticals conference in London last month (Marketletter March 23) that the industry is globalizing rapidly, and that companies need to monitor, anticipate, adapt to and influence the changing rules of the game. These are conditions that can give European-based manufacturers a competitive edge over the US- and Japanese-based companies, he noted, because European companies have had to learn long ago how to adapt their organizations and processes to succeed simultaneously in markedly different national markets, government environments, and economies.

However, he added, companies which have traditionally concentrated on giant, single-country markets have learned how to organize for efficiencies of scale that may also be advantageous in a world where market needs are global and the influences of regulators are homogenizing. "In short," he told the meeting, "I'm proposing that the critical success factors for the pharmaceutical industry are the same, regardless of where one competes in the 1990s, but companies with historical origins in the USA, or Europe or along the Pacific Rim each bring a different facility for implementing those factors."