International Strategy for Sustainable Growth in Multinational Pharmaceutical Companies

Fumio Teramae, Tomohiro Makino, Yeongjoo Lim, Shintaro Sengoku and Kota Kodama
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Fumio Teramae: Graduate School of Technology Management, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka 567-8570, Japan
Tomohiro Makino: Graduate School of Technology Management, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka 567-8570, Japan
Yeongjoo Lim: Faculty of Business Administration, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka 567-8570, Japan
Shintaro Sengoku: School of Environment and Society, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo 152-8550, Japan
Kota Kodama: Graduate School of Technology Management, Ritsumeikan University, Osaka 567-8570, Japan

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-14

Abstract: Although it is generally agreed that the pharmaceutical industry is in a state of rapid internationalization, there is no clear comprehensive explanation of the current state and effectiveness of an international strategy. There are many studies about internationalization but they neither focus on the pharmaceutical industry nor evaluate the effectiveness of an international strategy with a control. Therefore, we investigate the current state of internationalization with a sample of the 30 multinational pharmaceutical companies, as well as the effectiveness of an international strategy by comparing two international strategies. In this study, we define an international strategy as a strategy that controls the geographic distribution of sales across regions to maximize total sales. The results show that 33% of the companies are still home-region-oriented, and we did not find any evidence of the effectiveness of an international strategy that pursues a balanced geographic distribution across regions in terms of total sales and adjusted total sales. The results provide the practical implication that pharmaceutical companies should weigh up the specific markets to secure higher sales through the advantage of adapting to customers’ needs. This paper contributes to the research on sustainable growth by empirically providing results of comparisons of different international strategies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Keywords: pharmaceutical industry; strategy implementation; globalization; growth assessment; comparison results (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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