Drug Sales To Shrink

From Forbes:
The global pharmaceutical market, measured in dollars, will shrink in 2009 for the first time in 25 years, according to a new report.

Sales of medicines will generate between $750 billion and $760 billion this year, according to a revised forecast from research firm IMS Health ( RX - news - people ), down from $773 billion in 2008. A big part of that decrease is the relative strength in the dollar. But even when exchange rates are held constant, IMS now forecasts sales growth of only 3%, 40% less than IMS was predicting as recently as October.

"We were already predicting the lowest growth rate ever, and we decided to take that down further," says Murray Aitken, a senior vice president at IMS. He said that the overall economic climate was the main reason for the new cut in expectations. ...more