Big Pharma in Mexico

Big Pharmaceutical (Big Pharma) companies were enjoying large sales, enormous profits and customer compliance all over the world during the last decades. Their considerable profits were based on the sales of their most-profitable products – blockbuster drugs. Blockbusters are defined as branded prescription drugs that generate at least $1 billion of revenue annually (Merrill, 2011). Over the past 50 years, this blockbuster-drug business model has been very successful because in case the drug is widely accepted and sold not only does it produce an effective therapy for a lot of people but also it generates immense profits for the pharmaceutical producer (Mara G. Aspinall, 2007). Huge R&D costs that were incurred in order to discover all time most profitable blockbuster-drugs such as Lipitor by Pfizer (US sales in 2011 – 7.7 billion dollars), Plavix by Bristol-Myers Squibb/Sanofi Aventis (US sales in 2011 – 6.8 billion dollars) and many others (Bartholow, 2012) (Table 1) have paid off in most profitable and biggest developed markets such as United States (US), Europe and Japan.