No Japanese pharmaceutical company is poised to make a significant impact in Europe on its own over the next five years, according to Japanese Pharmaceutical Expansion into Europe, a new Financial Times Management Report. By the year 2000, Eisai, Fujisawa, Sankyo, Takeda and Yamanouchi will be operating independent marketing subsidiaries in two or more of the major European countries, although these companies will still be using co-marketing partners at that time.
The study's author, industry consultant Donald Macarthur, notes that the first Japanese drug industry presence in Europe was the opening of Sankyo's representative office in Basle, Switzerland, in 1963. Green Cross and Otsuka then acquired European bases through acquisitions, but the first pan-European network was established by Takeda, which formed joint ventures with Roussel Uclaf in France in 1978, Gruenenthal in West Germany in 1981 and Cyanamid in 1982. Until 1987, further major moves were rare, but since that year more than twice as many Japanese pharmaceutical operations have been set up in Europe than in all the previous years combined.
This has of course been due to the single European Community market, and Mr Macarthur comments that in some ways, Japanese competition has been the major catalyst for the single market. The fact that Europe's pre-eminence in discovery of New Chemical Entities was being rapidly eroded by Japan has been given by the EC Commission as justification for its intervention in the pharmaceutical sector, and also to support patent term extension.
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