Pharma Report Predicts Trillion Dollar Global Industry by 2020

EvalutePharma’s seventh edition of its World Preview documents that worldwide prescription drug sales forecast will exceed the one trillion dollar mark by 2020. The company bases this estimate on the growing compound annual growth rate (CAGR) that the pharmaceutical industry is currently enjoying. It predicts that CAGR will continue to grow through 2020, ultimately reaching a peak at 5.1%, up sharply from the increase from 3.8% to 4.4% over the past year. 

Part of this positive outlook stems from the company’s predicted impact of biological products on the patent cliff. Between 2014 and 2020, $259bn of total sales have been deemed at risk from patent expiration.

That said, it is expected that the impact of biological patent expiries will go a long way to reduce the rate of cannibalization that actually materializes (containing it to 46%), thus allowing the pharmaceutical industry to continue to grow without suffering the loss of reduced sales.

Biological products are also predicted to factor more heavily into the total sales percentage. Evaluate predicts that, by 2020, biological products will account for more than 50% of sales within the top 100 prescription products. Recently introduced biologic products like sovaldi, xarelto, nivolumab, and tecfidera) -none of them among the top 10 sellers for 2013 - will dominate the top 10 by 2020. This illustrates the coming dominance of complex biologics and specialty care medicines in comparison to the small molecule drugs that have dominated sales for the industry in the past.

By 2020, only two of the top 10 sellers will come from this latter group. There will be some continuity at the very top: Abbvie’s Humira, the number one sales drug in 2013, is projected to bethe world’s highest selling product in 2020, with a worldwide sales forecast of $12.7bn,

Stoking optimism is the labeling of 2013 as a big year in terms of FDA approvals, which were up 43% compared to 2012. The report predicts that these new approvals could amass an additional $24.4bn dollars in profit for the pharmaceutical industry by 2018.

The World Preview report also documents a recent surge in R&D spending. It states that the current value of the pharmaceutical industry’s R&D pipeline is $418.5bn, a 46% increase from the past year.

A portion of this growth is attributed to Bristol-Meyers Squibb’s anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, Nivolumab, which is the single most valuable R&D product, at $23billion. The company expects that R&D expenditure will continue to grow in the coming years at a moderate 2.4% increase, culminating in a $162bn spend between 2013 and 2020. 

In terms of individual company success, Novartis recently unseated Pfizer as the leader in worldwide Rx sales. EvaluatePharma is predicting that Novartis will continue to be the top company in terms of worldwide Rx sales through 2020. Teva Pharmaceutical continues to lead the generic drug market. The company also forecast that the enterprise value of Gilead Sciences has nearly doubled over the last year. 

Oncology is on pace to record the highest worldwide sales growth of major therapy categories, enjoying a projected CAGR of 11.2% between 2013 and 2020.

To view the report, see www.evaluategroup.com/wp2014.