The top pharmaceutical companies of 2012 that focus on human prescription drugs, with some diversification, depending on the company, in consumer-healthcare and animal-health products, are different from leading companies of the 1990s (see Tables I–III). In 1990, several top players were not stand-alone drug companies but instead were the pharmaceutical units of multinational chemical companies, reflecting the historical marriage between the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. As the strategic value of pharmaceuticals as a business grew, so did merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, and with it, divestments of chemical and agrochemical concerns and M&A of pharmaceutical businesses that would eventually create the pharmaceutical powerhouses of today. Today, the industry is again at another crossroad as it contends with generic-drug incursion and reduced R&D productivity, thereby facing challenges by which the top companies have responded by increasing biologic-based drug development, targeting growth in emerging markets, and beginning to apply diagnostics in drug development.

The 1990s and early 2000s

Table I: Top global pharmaceutical companies, 1990

In 1995, the German chemical conglomerate Hoechst acquired Marion Merrell Dow of Kansas City, Missouri , a pharmaceutical concern created from the 1989 merger of Marion Laboratories and Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals. In 1989, Dow Chemical had acquired a controlling interest in Marion Laboratories, which was renamed Marion Merrell Dow. In 1999, the pharmaceutical unit of Hoechst, Hoechst Marion Roussel, merged with Rhône-Poulenc (which had spun off its chemicals division in 1997 into a separate company, Rhodia) to create a separate pharmaceutical company, Aventis, which was later acquired by Sanofi–Synthélabo in 2004 to create Sanofi-Aventis. Sanofi–Synthélabo had been formed in 1999 by the merger on Sanofi and Synthélabo.

In 1996, Novartis was established from the merger of the pharmaceutical businesses of Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz following the respective spinoffs of the specialty chemical businesses of Ciba-Geigy to form Ciba-Geigy Specialty Chemicals and of Sandoz to form Clariant, which later acquired the specialty chemical business of Hoechst in 1997. In 2000, Novartis divested its agrochemical business and combined it with the divested agrochemical business of AstraZeneca to form Syngenta, thereby focusing Novartis and AstraZeneca in pharmaceuticals. AstraZeneca was created from the 1999 merger of Astra AB of Sweden and the Zeneca Group of the UK. Zeneca was formed from the demerger of three businesses (pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and specialty chemicals) of the UK chemical company ICI beginning in 1993.

American Home Products, which included its pharmaceutical business, then called Wyeth-Ayerst, merged in 1994 with the conglomerate American Cyanamid, which was diversified in consumer and industrial products, pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and industrial chemicals. Seeking to build its life-science activities, American Home Products was subsequently involved in three unsuccessful deals in the late 1990s: a merger with SmithKlineBeecham in 1998; a merger with Monsanto in 1999; and perhaps its most notable, a failed 2000 bid for Warner-Lambert, which was later acquired by Pfizer. In 2002, American Home Products changed its name to Wyeth, after spinning off unrelated businesses to focus on its pharmaceutical and consumer-healthcare businesses.