High cost of sales and academic promotion is a common problem in pharmaceutical industry

[pharmaceutical Station industry trends] recently, the Ministry of finance has carried out a month's accounting inspection on 77 pharmaceutical enterprises The focus of this audit is to verify the authenticity of sales expenses, costs, revenues and the existence of commercial bribery of pharmaceutical enterprises The list of 77 pharmaceutical enterprises includes not only multinational pharmaceutical enterprises such as Sanofi (Beijing) Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., Shanghai Squibb of China and the United States, but also domestic famous pharmaceutical enterprises such as Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical (Group), Hengrui Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd and Bubu Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd So, so far, how about the inspection? According to the public situation, the author found that the high sales cost of pharmaceutical enterprises is a big problem, and some enterprises even grow for many years in a row For example, from 2013 to 2018, the sales expenses of Peking University Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd rose from 120 million yuan to 587 million yuan, with sales expenses rising 5 times in a row In 2018, the revenue returned to the "origin" of 2013 In 2018, the operating revenue of Peking University Pharmaceutical was 2.316 billion yuan, of which sales expense was 587 million yuan, accounting for more than a quarter According to the 2018 annual report of Peking University pharmaceutical, the increase of the company's sales expenses is mainly due to the increase of market development expenses In addition to Peking University pharmaceutical, according to the public annual reports of pharmaceutical companies, the market expenses of Hengrui pharmaceutical account for 83.91% of the sales expenses; the market expenses of Fosun Pharmaceutical account for 78.03%; and the market expenses of Cr 39 account for 77.42% Obviously, the high cost of sales seems to be the "common problem" of the whole industry In addition to the cost of sales, the high cost of academic promotion is also a major "criticism" For example, according to the 2018 annual report of step Pharma, the total academic promotion expenses of Linlin, the company's market activity fee, market research fee, academic activity fee and academic exchange fee, totaled 7.485 billion yuan in 2018 It is reported that academic promotion has become a means for pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs since pharmaceutical representatives have been explicitly forbidden to stay outside the door of pharmaceutical companies Even almost every pharmaceutical enterprise's academic promotion fee occupies the "capital giant", some pharmaceutical enterprises even spend more than 2 billion yuan on academic promotion alone In fact, from the perspective of the cost structure of pharmaceutical enterprises, apart from a large number of academic promotion costs, the rest is not divided into R & D and investment "Academic R & D" may be a cover for all kinds of expenditure Once checked, the problem of "paper wrapped" appeared For pharmaceutical companies, although it is necessary to spend money on academic promotion, drug research and development should be the top priority How to carry out academic promotion on the edge of compliance is worth pondering Industry analysis, pharmaceutical companies do academic promotion itself is no big problem, but the risk is relatively large "Because of the increasing supervision in this area, only the real compliance marketing and academic promotion can meet this challenge Any opportunistic, short-term and fluky marketing behavior has great risks and costs, which is not conducive to the long-term development of the enterprise " This audit activity is only an anatomic analysis of some enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry A series of problems exposed need to be paid more attention to by pharmaceutical enterprises According to the industry, the Ministry of finance also wants to thoroughly understand the tax behavior of pharmaceutical enterprises through this audit and know whether pharmaceutical enterprises are following up the implementation of the "two vote system" In addition, this inspection activity can also provide the medical insurance bureau with more basis for drug price reduction, and then prepare for the next centralized purchase From the current industry situation, as the second batch of volume purchase list is coming out, the pharmaceutical sector is likely to remain depressed in the short term.