Generic Drugs
Compared to innovator or specialty generic products, developing dossiers for generic drugs is both faster and cheaper, despite the need to conduct still rather expensive bio-equivalence clinical trials to prove the efficacy of a generic drug to be at par with the innovator counterpart. EB pharma develops many generic drugs on a constant basis, as respective patent expiration dates approach, with focus on CNS and neuroscience field. We do not develop generics that share the same compounds of innovator products in our marketing portfolio.
Unlike innovator or specialty generic drugs, generic drugs are usually introduced when the innovator counterparts have been on the market for many years and have established connections with the stakeholders. Therefore, despite saving the effort to educate the prescribers about the drugs, marketing generic products largely involves converting innovator prescriptions instead of searching for new users of the compounds. The keys to success include:
It would be difficult to market generic drugs as superior to innovators on both quality and efficacy, so price would be the only selling point. We would target customers who are more sensitive to price as our primary users.
In addition to pricing, launching generics promptly is also important. Before the arrival of the first generic brand, the market would be a monopoly with high selling price. When the first generic player joins the competition, the market became oligopolistic, decreasing the prevailing selling price by limited margin. When many other generics become available, nearly competitive pricing will significantly drive down the selling price to nearly the cost of goods sold. Therefore, EB pharma starts developing dossiers well before the anticipated patent expiration date, enabling us to launch the products at the earliest timing.
Following the same logic above, it would be a waste to launch a generic product early but lack complimentary marketing strategies and sales network. EB pharma, through our well-established sales and marketing team, maximizes such efficiency and therefore our generic market share.
As mentioned above, continuing price decline is expected after more generic brands become available for a particular compound, with price reaching an asymptotic minimum when it becomes close enough to the cost of goods sold. Therefore, the generic player with the lowest cost would be the one most likely to stay competitive, enlarging its market share at the expense of exiting competitors. EB pharma strives to expand market share in the beginning of the generic emergence, thus building economies of scale. Adding to the fact EB pharma is usually the holder of marketing authorization, we would be one of the surviving generics after the market becomes very mature.
