Findings from 7 Nice Insight global industry surveys covering outsourced products and services, equipment, and private equity funding provided by over 440 different companies.
At the heart of That’s Nice is the Nice Insight division, which provides data and analysis from proprietary annual surveys as well as custom primary and secondary research of many kinds. Nice Insight is tasked every year with conducting a series of surveys, which offer unique insight into what companies in the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology sectors see as the key trends and drivers in their business.
In this feature, we summarize the results – and ‘summarize’ is an understatement for the few words used to overview the vast array of data comprised in the reports, which cover over 856 providers of outsourcing services that we track. The longest-established surveys are now seven years old and we are continually adding to the list.
With the obvious exception of the 2017 Nice Insight Life Sciences Private Equity/Venture Capital Investment Survey, these draw on answers from a basically similar group of relevant senior executives to bring together a complete picture of the market landscape.
In each of the articles that follow, a survey profile is drawn from a representative sample of companies both geographically (North America, Europe and Asia) and size of company (large, medium-sized and small pharma/biotech companies). They are also rigorously profiled to ensure that every respondent has deep knowledge of the particular section of the market s/he is talking about.
In each case, too, you will learn what the key drivers are for assessing, then selecting and also evaluating suppliers, the kinds of products and services sponsors currently require, how they anticipate their needs will evolve over time, the stages of the development chain they are most prone to outsourcing, what attributes are most important in maintaining a relationship, the main reasons dissatisfaction may occur, and much more.
The full reports, of course, go into much more detail; for instance, do makers of small-molecule APIs expect their consumption of coloring agents to increase over the next three years? The answer is in there: 38% say it will increase, 45% say it will stay the same and 17% say it will decrease. And that is just one statistic.
Summarizing here what has already been summarized in the following articles would be to take things to the extreme. Suffice to say that the results are not always what conventional wisdom might say.
Demand for seemingly basic products such as excipients and intermediates remains surprisingly buoyant, and the ‘CDMO’ trend is far more than hype. Suppliers of preclinical and clinical contract research services face challenges to broaden their consumer base. Meanwhile, changes in the kinds of drugs being developed are greatly impacting the kind of equipment and clinical supply services the industry needs.