Preparing for, Surviving and Thriving in a Consolidating Pharmaceutical Industry
By Jamie Weissglass
The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing heightened merger and acquisition activity, due in large part to rising competition, increasing regulatory challenges and expiring patents’ periods of exclusivity. In 2018, the industry saw 248 mergers worth approximately $198 billion; one law firm predicts that the value of transactions will soar to $331 billion in 2019.
In the course of these transactions, many pharmaceutical companies have encountered information governance challenges that they did not anticipate—or budget for—prior to the merger. As they begin to assess the disparate data source landscapes in an effort to unify their systems, issues in their document retention, preservation and retrieval become readily apparent, requiring a substantial amount of time and monetary investment to resolve—resources that are typically scarce after a transaction closes. This generally means that the necessitated data mapping, remediation and integration endeavors are deprioritized, leaving these combined organizations even more exposed in the event of litigation or a regulatory or compliance investigation.
This white paper takes a closer look at the status of mergers and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry, the challenges that these transactions exacerbate for the combined companies and solutions for mitigating those risks.