Outsourcing decisions have traditionally been driven by cost factors. However, with the wider global economic balance shifting from west to east, and with the growing importance of end-markets in Asia being matched with increasing Asian pharmaceutical expertise across the value chain, cost is just one of the factors that companies need to consider when taking outsourcing decisions in Asia.

Increasingly, such decisions need to be informed by strategic as much as tactical considerations. The outsourcing steps that companies make today cannot be divorced from the footprint strides they will need to make over a 10-20-year time period. We find that companies need to balance a number of factors, ranging from the forces that are affecting current and future pharmaceutical business models to the opportunities and constraints posed by the dynamics of growth, convergence and divergence at work in the Asian region.

We have identified four clusters of factors (Figure 1) that are relevant to the decision-making context faced by multinational pharmaceutical companies when they consider outsourcing in Asian territories. Increasingly, these factors are also equally relevant to the outsourcing carried out by the fast-growing Asia-based pharmaceutical companies.

Pharma Outsourcing, Glaxo-SmithKline, GSK, Advinus Therapeutics, IPP Laws, Food and Drug Administration, FDA, Multinational Pharmaceutical Companies, Chain Productivity, Intellectual Property Protection, Fully-Integrated Pharmaceutical Network, FIPNET.