Biopharma
World's Most Productive Companies
Biopharma’s Divergent Paths: Pipelines, Pricing, and Productivity
Across large biopharma, four common threads stand out. They all share a tilt toward specialty and biologics, a push to raise R&D productivity, a deepening use of digital and AI in plants and supply chains, and disciplined capital deployment via mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and partnerships. The operating model is leaner, more outsourced where it helps, and more data-driven across discovery to commercial.
Five forces dominated the biopharma industry from 2019 to 2024. Growth returned as specialty therapies expanded, FDA approvals remained high, and digital methods gained traction, even while COVID-19 revenues declined. Price controls tightened, patent cliffs loomed, M&A and partnerships rose, and supply chains faced record shortages. Oncology-led growth, immunology absorbed biosimilar pressure, and metabolic disease surged. The peer group was overall very dispersed, with no discernible pattern that all followed. Trajectories hinged on four key levers: pipeline quality and launch execution; manufacturing readiness for complex biologics and injectables; net price realization under policy pressure and the emergence of biosimilars; and operating-model simplification with digital tools. Firms that aligned these moved productivity up; gaps in any one pulled it down.
2024 was defined by the incretin wave, tighter pricing policy, and strained supply. Regulatory throughput stayed strong; M&A cooled from 2023 levels, but partnerships persisted. Plants leveraged AI-enabled control, analytics, and capacity realignment to stabilize yields and enhance resilience in biologics and sterile injectables.
Top 100 World's Most Productive Companies - Biopharma
Productivity Snapshot
- Productivity in the sector increased by 12.79% over the last six years. This Peer Group performed slightly above the average for manufacturers represented in the IPI. Biopharma companies did not move as a group, nor follow the typical IPI trends over the last six years.
- Seven of the fourteen companies in this peer group had negative productivity growth in 2024.
- 2024 productivity remained flat compared to 2023 overall for the group.
- Two companies in this peer group earned their position within the LNS Research 2025 World’s Most Productive Companies. Merck and Lilly. Merck distinguished itself by growing its productivity 3.6 times that of its peers over the last six years, capturing operating leverage (expanding margins), reallocating capital toward high-return assets, and streamlining its portfolio. This approach achieved stronger profitability growth and margin expansion relative to many peers.
- Eli Lilly also earned a spot in the LNS Research 2025 World's Most Productive Companies. Lilly’s productivity performance improved by over 1.7 times that of the rest of the peer group, driven by margin expansion enabled by high-growth, high-margin therapies, scaled manufacturing leverage, and disciplined resource concentration—outpacing many peers whose portfolios lacked similar blockbuster-driven leverage.
