Chinese pharma leapfrogs ahead

As if to bolster Big Pharma's recent turn toward emerging markets for growth, a new study has pegged China as the fifth largest pharmaceutical market by 2010. With Chinese pharma sales growing at the rapid clip of 20 percent per year, annual revenues could top $24 billion by that time.

Just to put those numbers in perspective, the U.S. pharma market stood at $286 billion in 2007 sales, according to IMS Health. But given the fact that China represented only 5 percent of the worldwide drugs market in 2003, moving up to the fifth-largest market would be quite a leap.

- read the story at PharmaLive

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