Pharma emerging-market numbers fall short

All right, Big Pharma--we know you're looking to grow in emerging markets, that promised land of 13 percent to 14 percent annual growth. So shouldn't you be fessing up to the details of your operations there? That's the question In Vivo poses today, prompted by a perusal of Pfizer's new numbers on the subject.

To date, only a few drugmakers have broken out their emerging markets revenues to give investors an idea of how operations in China, Brazil, India, etc. are faring. GlaxoSmithKline does; Sanofi does; Novartis does; and now so does Pfizer. Schering details its revenues from Latin America as a whole and from the Asia Pacific region, but doesn't specify further.

"Not all of the drug companies are willing to disclose their levels of sales in the Emerging Markets regions," Sanford F. Bernstein analyst Tim Anderson writes in a new report (quoted by In Vivo). "Our guess (hope?) is that the level of disclosure will only increase over time, given how much each company is now talking about the opportunity." No kidding. If we only had a dollar for every time a pharma CEO mentioned the words ... 

- read the In Vivo post