Comparative Analysis of Russian Pharmaceutical Companies Competitiveness

In this paper we investigate the influence of the company's operating factors on the competitiveness, expressed as the market share occupied by the company. To determine the key factors influencing the competitiveness of companies in the pharmaceutical sector, there were considered the existing methods of competitiveness measurement, industry specifics and peculiarities of Russian companies in this market. There are 266 pharmaceutical companies of Europe and Russia in the period from 2004 to 2014 in the sample of study, the share of Russian companies is 5%. The subsequent regression analysis revealed the positive effect of financial leverage, the overall size of the company, expressed by the natural logarithm of total assets and number of patents as the identificator of innovation activity. In addition, we used the Data Envelopment Analysis, which revealed that about the half of the Russian pharmaceutical enterprises are not inferior to European counterparts (in terms of competitiveness), which revenues are close to values from the Russian financial reports for the 2004-2014. After ranking companies regarding competitiveness, there are given specific recommendations to the firms (made on the basis of envelopment analysis), which allows to increase the occupied market share.