Who's On First? Top 10 Global Pharmaceutical Companies Raked in Over $361 billion in 2015 Sales

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Reported by Annette Kreuger, Industrial Info Resources, Incorporated (Sugar Land, Texas)--It is a rarified air up at the top, but not exactly lonely, as the world's mightiest pharmaceutical companies jockey for space to be number one. A look at just the top 10 (as listed in the 2016 Pharmaceutical & Biotech Outlook) reveals over $361 billion in combined 2015 pharma sales revenue. While some of the players are familiar, others are comparative upstarts, who charged up the hill armed with blockbuster drugs to clear their way.

Click on the image at right for a graph detailing global project spending by the top 10 pharma companies.

European stunner Novartis International AG (NYSE:NVS) (Basel, Switzerland) and warhorse Pfizer Incorporated (NYSE:PFE) (New York, New York) battle it out for number one. By some accounts, Novartis edged out Pfizer in 2015, thanks in no small part to its Leukemia treatment Gleevec/Glivec, which generated nearly $5 billion in 2015 sales. Pfizer's own lead drug, painkiller Lyrica, sold over $5 billion. Rounding out the top three, F. Hoffman-La Roche (Roche) (OTXQX:RHHBY) (Basel, Switzerland) has pushed its perch riding on cancer treatment Avastin and its $6.8 billion in sales last year.

Whether because of their own strong in-house pipelines or the now standard business tool of snatching up a good drug though mergers & acquisitions (M&A), these companies all have one thing in common. Each had one drug that generated over $4.5 billion in annual sales in 2015.

Many of those drugs lost patent protection last year or are on the chopping block in 2016, so all are determined, not to mention required, to feed the product pipeline with drugs that will sell and sell well. The biggest seller in terms of price in 2015 was AbbVie's (NYSE:ABBV) (Chicago, Illinois) Humira, a rheumatoid arthritis drug that generated over $14 billion in sales.

Drugs, both their development and production, require cash-intensive facility investment. These top 10 companies currently have over $9 billion in active reported capital and maintenance (MRO) projects across the world along with 348 operational global manufacturing or research sites, with more in planning.

These figures do not address the almost across-the-board utilization of outsourcing by the top 10 to contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs) and the resultant required capital investment to offer dedicated capacity. The CMO sector is enjoying the continuous wave of steady contracts, all the while with no apparent impact of in-house spending at all.

Top 10 Global Pharmaceutical Company Rankings by 2015 Sales Revenue (Millions $USD)

	Company	2015 Pharma Revenue
1	Novartis	$49,414.00
2	Pfizer	$48,900.00
3	Roche	$48,145.00
4	Sanofi	$40,000.00
5	Merck & Co.	$39,500.00
6	Gilead Sciences	$32,640.00
7	Johnson & Johnson	$31,330.00
8	AstraZeneca	$24,700.00
9	GlaxoSmithKline	$23,920.00
10	AbbVie	$22,859.00

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