R&D Expenditure
During the April 2018 – March 2019 fiscal year, the top 20 Japanese pharma companies invested a total of over 14 billion USD in R&D efforts, averaging around 16% of sales revenue. The graph below presents this data on an individual company basis. Expenditure figures include investment in clinical trials and in-house R&D as well as outsourcing to third parties.
Top 20 R&D Spending 2018-19
It is noteworthy that the combined R&D budget of the top 10 companies (~13 billion USD) is an order of magnitude greater than the rest (~1.2 billion USD). The top companies also tend to spend a greater percentage of their sales revenue on R&D. Nevertheless, smaller companies still spend significant amounts on research, and experience shows they can be excellent customers.