This statistic depicts the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies based on pharmaceutical revenue in 2017. In that year, Swiss corporation Novartis generated some 33 billion U.S. dollars of pure pharmaceutical revenue.
Top global pharmaceutical companies
The top pharmaceutical companies when based exclusively on revenue with pharmaceutical products are Pfizer, Roche, and Sanofi, as of 2017. The companies generated 52.5 billion U.S. dollars, 44.4 billion U.S. dollars, and 36.7 billion U.S. dollars, respectively, in that year. In the last years, Swiss company Novartis lost its top 3 ranking, but it is still ranked sixth. Novartis is a multinational company based in Basel, Switzerland. The company was established in 1996 through the merger of Swiss pharmaceutical companies, Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz Laboratories. One of Novartis' segment consists of over-the-counter drugs such as Excedrin. Excedrin garnered 59.9 million U.S. dollars in revenue in the year ended July 2014 in the United States. This is a drug normally marketed as a headache pain reliever and sold in the form of a tablet or caplet.
From the United Sates, Johnson & Johnson was one of the largest biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies as of 2017, generating 72.5 billion U.S. dollars in total revenue. Johnson & Johnson’s revenue from the company’s top three drugs accounted for 36 percent of the company’s total pharmaceutical revenues. Novartis’s revenue generated by its top three drugs accounted for 25 percent of its total pharmaceutical revenues. In 2016, the U.S. pharma industry spent some 47 billion U.S. dollars within the country on pharmaceutical research and development and 11.8 billion U.S. dollars abroad.
