Agrow Biotech News

> Not a subscriber? Subscribe to Agrow to receive the full report

CHAPTER 1 - OVERVIEW

1.1 Background to reports

Generic pesticides and the companies that produce them are becoming an increasingly important part of the agrochemical industry. A combination of the general decline in the discovery of new pesticide active ingredients (ais) and the steady loss of patent protection on existing ais means that the generic pesticide industry is growing faster than the R&D-based agrochemical industry.

This growth is in terms of both numbers of available ais and total sales. There are no authoritative figures available for the size of the generic pesticide industry, but in 1996 it was estimated to account for around 10% of the global agrochemical industry. In 2005, it is likely to account for 20–30% of the global agrochemical industry, which means that it now generates annual sales of $6,000–$9,000 million.

This report is the second in a set of three investigating the current state of the generic pesticide industry and market. The first report contains profiles of 100 of the most important generic pesticide companies in the world today. This second report contains profiles of 100 of the most important generic pesticide ais. The third report provides a detailed analysis of the generic pesticide market and industry, and explores the forces that will drive the development of the generic pesticide industry over the next few years. These three reports are updated editions of similar reports on the generic pesticide industry that Agrow published first in 1998 and then, as a new edition, in 2001.

In these current reports, a generic pesticide company is defined as a company, or division of a company, that undertakes as part of its business the manufacture of pesticide ais for which the patents have expired. For the first time in this set of reports, the author has not excluded companies that held the original patents to those ais, which means that Monsanto is now a profiled company.

1.2 Outline of Companies report

The 100 companies that are profiled in the first report are listed in Table 1.1. In deciding which specific generic pesticide companies to profile, the main criteria used was generic pesticide sales, and for the top 50 companies this proved to be the only necessary criteria.

However, the generic pesticide industry is made up of only a relatively few companies with annual sales over $100 million, and hundreds of smaller companies with sales under $100 million (most of which have sales below $20 million). Deciding which of these companies to profile proved much more difficult, especially as sales figures for many of these companies were unavailable. The author chose the bottom 50 companies based mainly on the quality and quantity of information available. Information was obtained from company web sites and from stories that have appeared in Agrow. Nevertheless, the profiled companies provide an accurate picture of the current state of the generic pesticide industry.

Table 1.1: List of profiled generic pesticide companies