Pharmaceutical Industry

Domestic pharmaceutical industry, as one of the strategic high-technology industries, has a significant impact on individuals’ health. Despite its success in providing maximum medicine domestically, the industry, with its more than 110 active manufacturing companies in the form of semi-governmental holdings, private companies, and agile knowledge-based companies, faces challenges at the policy and operational levels. The challenges, situations, and some strengths of the industry would be identified in the present study using the scientific research method. To identify and review the challenges and status and also to explain the improvement strategies, in-depth interviews with 8 experts in the pharmaceutical industry in senior management positions in the manufacturing industry, regulators, and related syndicates planned and qualitative content analysis method using MAXQDA 2020 software platform applied to identify the challenges, situations, and strengths of the industry. According to the qualitative content analysis, challenges related to inappropriate policy-making, limited financial resources, and inappropriate pricing policies in the industry have been identified as the most important obstacles versus industry development, and on the other hand, the maximum supply of medicine in the country, appropriate knowledge  base and desirable quality of some products are listed as strengths of the industry. Efforts to reform macro policies and industry strategies at the policy and regulatory levels, including private sector development, commitment to quality improvement, and the development of new pricing methods, are among the most important future solutions to cope with the challenges of the industry.

The current research was conducted with the aim of providing a model of international strategic business renewal in the country's pharmaceutical industry in a combined manner in two qualitative and quantitative phases. In the first phase, the research data was obtained from in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 18 subject matter experts, including entrepreneurs, managers, and senior experts in the pharmaceutical industry in Tehran province, which was based on purposeful sampling dependent on the selection criteria and until reaching the theoretical saturation of this process continued. The validity of the research data was checked and confirmed by going back to the participants and external auditors. Data analysis was done based on the Strauss and Corbin model in the form of open, axial, and selective coding in the Atlas TI8 software. The results of the research showed that entrepreneurial, organizational, managerial, environmental, marketing, international strategy, lean supply chain, social component, organizational performance, and financial performance components are important in designing the international strategic renewal model of pharmaceutical industry businesses. In the second phase of the research, according to the managers and experts of the Ministry of Privacy, there were 681 elites of the Ministry of Privacy, of which 248 research samples were identified using Morgan's sample size table; The tool for collecting information in this section was a researcher-made questionnaire in a five-point Likert spectrum; In order to estimate the validity of the questionnaire, content validity was used using the CVR method and confirmatory factor analysis; Also, the reliability of the tool was estimated to be higher than 0.7 through Cronbach's alpha. The results showed that causal conditions with (0.39), contextual conditions with (0.55), and intervening conditions with (0.34) have an effect on strategies, and strategies have an effect on outcomes with (0.85).

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing value chain (VC) in pharmaceutical industry, as a very important sector in Iran. The research method is descriptive-analytical in term of method. The required data have been collected from the experts of a public joint stock company. Conducting the research, first the literature of VC is reviewed to identify the initial factors affecting on VC of pharmaceutical companies. In this Phase, 34 factors were identified in 8 categories including; institutional, industry, political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors. In the next step, a primal evaluation of the initial factors by 14 experts of the research, resulted to the 20 more important factors which were used in the modelling process. Due to the need for fuzzy logic regarding subjective judgments in cause-effect relationships between factors, the fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) method in FCM expert software is used to visualize the relationships among these factors. The results show that technological capabilities, government policies, company resilience, financial strength, medicine price, sustainable waste management, cost of raw materials, production technology, cost of energy, R&D, operational efficiency, recycling capabilities, transportation cost, VC governance (coordination/ partnerships/ integration), consumer behavior and social (market) trends, environmental concerns about waste disposal internet of things (IoT) and connected devices, non-value-adding activities, import limitations and skilled human resources, respectively are the most influencing factors on pharmaceutical VC.