The Bangalore-based PharmaARC Analytic Solutions, a new start-up in the pharma marketing consultancy, has signed up two major contracts worth $4.5 million from multinational companies based in the US to provide strategic advisory services in the area of pharmaceutical marketing outside India.
The projects assigned to PharmaARC by two leading global companies is part of a trend setting approach in the global pharmaceutical industry to outsource marketing strategies from cheaper but capable locations replacing in-house strategic team.
"This is yet another outsourcing avenue being opened for the Indian professional organisations in pharmaceutical services in addition to basic research and clinical trails," said a pharma analyst.
The Mumbai-based Interlink Marketing Consultancy, which is a leading name in pharma marketing advisory services with over 15 major domestic companies in their clientele list, has also been approached by few global companies to outsource part of their marketing related work.
R B Smartha, managing director, Interlink said now more and more players will start exploring this opportunity as well in the emerging new world order in the pharma sector.
The former IMS-Lanka head S Bala Subrahmanyan, who is planning to set up the market advisory firm in India, is also quite buoyant about his existing multinational clients.
"Currently, we have three of our global clients who already have mooted this idea of shifting their back-end operations in the area of marketing strategy to low-cost but efficient locations like India," he added.
Though the names of multinational companies are confidential under the agreement, Siraj Dhanani, chief executive officer, PharmaARC, said both these companies are in the top 20 list of the world pharmaceutical industry with an annual turnover of over $10 billion.
"At present, outsourcing contracts are signed for three years and both these projects are concerned to the clients' local market requirements and not India. The total value of the outsourcing business would cross $1.5 million per annum," he said.
Dhanani said, "With this cost, the companies could achieve about 50 per cent cost reduction by replacing in-house marketing strategy team and approximately 35 to 40 per cent savings compared to consultancy service costs in the US."
The consultancy service under this project includes business intelligence and analysis exploring the competitive intelligence, market assessment and performance measurement.
The other sets of solutions under the three-year contract are sales force effectiveness consulting, forecasting services, market research analytics, which include sale force optimisation, customer targeting, segmentation, revenue forecast models and asset valuation.
The third part of the project pertains to epidemiology and pricing services comprises of statistical modeling, data analysis, secondary research, size of market and total cost of treatment analysis, Dhanani added.
