Generic Drugs Equals Big Savings

For many years, branded remedies dominated the medicine cabinets of households. The current global economic crisis, however, is pushing people to try generic drugs. In pharmacies worldwide, branded drugs are slowly being ousted by their generic counterparts. More and more people are now realizing that generic drugs carry the same potency as branded ones, but only for a fraction of the price of the branded types.

Bad news for branded medicines

The change in the trend in the pharmaceutical industry definitely resulted to a huge change in profit turnout for many companies, particularly for those that manufacture branded medicines. These big companies have declared that due to the increasing strength of their competitor generic drugs, even brands that used to sell fast no longer brings as much gains as before.

Further updates show that a branded drug manufacturing company experienced a big plunge on the sales of one of its popular medicines. From a sales output of $420 million last year, the sales went down to $91 million this year. That is about 300 percent from the previous year. Based on research the company has conducted on the occurrence, the emergence of cheaper generic versions of the drug has caused the plunge on sales.

In other companies, the plummeting sales resulted to the dismissal of almost 5000 employees. The main reasons behind this are cost-cutting and to recover losses brought by selling products at giveaway prices.

Great news for pharmacies and masses

While this phenomenon is slowly eating up the profits of large pharmaceutical companies, this might call a celebration among consumers and pharmacies. The more patrons generic drugs have, greater discounts and savings people would have, and therefore, more profits for generic drug manufacturers and pharmacies nationwide.

Industry analyses reveal that the rise of the generics can leave drugstores out of stock with medicines that are usually less preferred than the more popular brands. This means that pharmacies can now recover the capital they spent on generic merchandise. Since generics are cheaper, this means pharmacies only need to shed off minimum capital every time they replenish their supplies.

What?s with the sudden rise?

Generic medicines have been around at the same time as branded drugs. The only difference is that branded medicines are the ones who have been granted with patents, which give companies the right to label their medicines and to charge higher than usual. Since labels make consumers be familiarized with medicines, generic drugs were left to gather dust in the shelves.

Today, however, patents granted to some popular drugs are starting to expire. This means that generic drugs may now apply for patents and people may begin to acquaint themselves with new medicines. As the economy remains unstable, the rise of generic drugs in the market has been predicted to continue.