Charticle - Pharma Research Trends
You may have noticed an item in the Wall Street Journal this week about Charles River Labs ($CRL) warning of a slowdown in demand from its customers. Since CRL sells research equipment and services to large pharmaceutical companies, that suggests that Big Pharma is slowing down its R&D spending. The crackerjack Calcbench research team then wondered: how accurate is that hypothesis? What data do we have that might suggest where things are going? To answer those questions, Calcbench examined a group of roughly 120 pharmaceutical firms making at least $250 million in annual revenue, tracking their R&D spending as a percentage of revenue for the last 14 quarters. See Figure 1, below. The blue line is actual spending per quarter, and as you can see it has fluctuated from 15 to 25 percent since the start of 2021. The red line is the underlying trend, and that has been gliding up nicely, even though R&D spending levels have gyrated more wildly in the last year or so. But th...