A statistical examination of the integration of biotechnology in the Indian pharmaceutical sector

Abstract

From the beginning of the 1970s a number of Indian pharmaceutical firms had invested in gaining technological competence without having formal RD and through efficient reverse engineering had slashed the prices of products otherwise sold by Western multinationals. However, their knowledge base was founded on the chemical technology of creating bulk drugs and during the second half of the 1980s these firms were confronted with biotechnology, a set of techniques that was new and more complex to integrate. Using detailed panel data on a sample of 32 firms active in biopharmaceuticals, this paper attempts to understand the relationships between their size, R&D strategies and market sales. Given the small sample size, the statistical analysis of our data set is limited to the identification of associations between the different variables and is not extended to estimation of models. The methods used are descriptive statistics, principal component analysis and analysis of variance.