Category: Big Business

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The future ain’t what it used to be

A few months ago, I wrote about the Chrysler 300C, which appealed to me because it resembled the Batmobile. Over at 2Blowhards, Donald Pettinger writes about the 1950s’ dream cars, with a fantastic gallery of Cars of the Future:

With no place to go trend-wise, stylists thrashed around in search a new trends or themes. One such theme was aviation or space, already successfully tested by Harley Earl at General Motors. I’m thinking of a series of futuristic scale models that yielded the famous 1948 Cadillac tail fins. The success of Cadillac led stylists to go pretty wild exploring that theme — wild to the point where dream cars (and to a lesser degree some production models) looked less and less like cars.

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Bad Drug Joke

The following was deleted from one of my pharma company profiles: “Dapoxetine was rejected by the FDA in 2005, but if its EU filing gets approval this year, another FDA submission could be coming soon.”

The best part is that the company is Johnson & Johnson.

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I want a new drug

I enjoy writing the big Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report each June. Sure, it’s not what I imagined I’d be doing when I was a brooding, pretentious idiot in college, but it turns out that there’s plenty of fun to be had in researching and writing these profiles.

For one thing, there’s the mystery/police procedural aspect of reading through annual reports and SEC statements and trying to figure out just what certain companies are trying to hide. Maybe it’s awful revenues from a new product (now conveniently reclassified into a group of products, so its figures aren’t broken out), or a diminished product pipeline (“I wonder why [company x] isn’t mentioning any of its late-stage projects”), or a quiet reorganization (last year, a company detailed its layoffs and plant closures, but made no statement anywhere about how much money it hoped to save in the process). It can take some detective work to figure this stuff out; I’m sure if I’d gotten myself an MBA, I could parse it more easily.

And for another thing, there’s the drugs.

I always enjoy reading through these companies’ reports to see about all the neat new therapies, the increased survival rates they bestow, the alleviation of previously uncureable conditions, the lifestyle changes we never thought possible. This, too can take some detective work, because some companies don’t seem to know what they have.

Por ejemplar: Today, I added UCB Group to my Top Biopharmas ranking. The company doesn’t have any biologic-based drugs on the market, but it’s got some in the pipeline, which is better than some of the other companies that I’ve included for years.

As part of its profile, I needed to list UCB’s best-selling drugs and how they performed last year. And that was how I discovered Nootropil, which posted around $125 million in 2006 sales.

“Nootropil?” thought I. “I wonder what that’s for . . . ?” Since I got a masters degree in liberal arts rather than business, I knew that the ‘noo-‘ root means ‘mind’ in Greek, and that left me intrigued.

According to UCB’s annual report, Nootropil’s a “cognitive enhancer.” Well, that begged more questions than it answered! Fortunately, the Internet has plenty of answers! It’s my cognitive enhancer!

Nootropil is known generically as piracetam and, according to this wiki page, it’s “a cerebral function regulating drug which, it is claimed, is able to enhance cognition and memory, slow down brain aging, increase blood flow and oxygen to the brain, aid stroke recovery, and improve Alzheimer’s, Down’s Syndrome, dementia, and dyslexia, among others.” Oh, and it has virtually no side effects.

Now if only I can convince them to send me some samples!

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Utilitarianism

Every summer, when we get rolling on the annual Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma report, my trusty associate editor compiles pipeline information for the past year. While I suss out sales figures and try to parse the arcana of accounting, she puts together lists of new drugs that were approved, extensions or new indications for approved drugs, those that are filed and pending approval, those that have lost patent protection, research projects in late-phase or early-phase studies, and those that were canceled or rejected.

That last category, the could-have-beens, is a testament to the enormous risk that drug companies take on. This year’s #1 company, Pfizer, recently had to cancel development of a drug that would have brought in upwards of $50 billion in revenues during its lifecycle. Future revenues are kaput and $1 billion in R&D investment has been flushed away with it.

Fortunately, Michael Moore has a strategy for eliminating this expense and the risk! America needs to regulate drug companies “like utilities since they’re just as important as electricity and water.” That’ll make them more productive and less expensive! Of course!

I mean, outside of the fact that the U.S. power grid is antiquated and prone to collapse, and that the water supply in this house was provided by a well for 35 years, I’d have to say he almost knows what he’s talking about.

I do find it funny when people tell me the pharma industry needs more regulation, and that drugs should be cheaper.

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Brand Unawareness, Part 2

“Gentlemen, our target market is. . . young people who don’t bother paying their bills!”

Apparently, those free-spending youths don’t care much for paying their cell-phone bills. A court motion filed on June 4 explains that Amp’d “experienced an unprecedented growth of subscribers” between November, 2006, and February after running ads on MTV about the wireless phone company’s lineup of mobile music and video content.

Collecting payments from these subscribers proved to be a challenge, however. “Approximately 90% of the debtor’s customers were on 18-month service contracts,” according to the filing. “The debtor began to find a host of credit and collections problems (that) contributed ultimately to a liquidity crisis.” By May, the number of nonpaying customers reached 80,000. That’s nearly half of Amp’d’s current customer base of 175,000 subscribers.

Funnily enough, the writer doesn’t quite the grok the contradiction in the following statement:

Here’s why Verizon may want to pick up Amp’d on the cheap: Amp’d has been exceptionally successful in getting its subscribers to use data services, which are expected to become the wireless industry’s growth engine in the coming years. In the first quarter of 2007, Amp’d users downloaded twice as many videos, songs, and games as in the fourth quarter of 2006.

Which sounds great, except their customers didn’t bother paying their bills!

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No horse in this race

Here’s a neat article about how wine overtook beer in America:

Meanwhile, the American middle classes have fast become connoisseurs of everything — coffee, ’80s Japanese garage-rock bands, environmentalist toilet paper. Now, Americans who want the exclusivity that connoisseurship offers but didn’t want to seem like snobs can have it both ways. Beer’s approachability became less of a virtue. Ironically, in the ultimate about-face, craft-brew drinkers lifted the language of wine. (Tasting notes for a pale ale from the Web site BeerAdvocate: “Nose is floral, like orange blossoms, with some citric rind and soft apple.”)

As someone who refers to himself as a “gin snob” (among other examples of my snobbishness), I can see what he means.

So, are you more of a wine drinker or a beer drinker? (excluded from this question: my teetotaling family and my recovering alcoholic exes)

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Publish and perish

Here’s an article about how Perseus Books Group is closing down two of its imprints: Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press. The further away I get from my indie-publishing days, the less I can understand how any of them stay afloat. This passage summed up how I tried to see things back then:

“When you see the book world conglomeratizing, it can only mean less diversity of voices,” said Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based imprint distributed by Perseus. “When I sign up a book, it matters more that I love it than that I’ve identified a good marketing niche for it. That’s the real essence of independent publishing — it’s not a deal, it’s supposed to be a labor of love.”

Then I lost the love.

I hope the founders of those presses got a decent purchase price when they joined up with Avalon Publishing (which was later acquired by Perseus), but I have a feeling that I can see where the “labor of love” part collided with the “good marketing niche” part:

“At Carroll & Graf, we bridged the gap between small, lesser-known presses and the larger houses when it comes to gay literature,” said Don Weise, a senior editor who is losing his job. “In the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve acquired more than 100 books, and no one has ever told me no, I couldn’t do that. In the book world, that’s unheard of.”

I probably would’ve moved his attribution, along with the “senior editor who is losing his job” part to the end of the paragraph, to make my point.