Until 2006, the companies, thinking of the informant/propagandist, oversized themselves beyond belief: the number of Informants had exceeded 30,000 units. The model was that of the commercial: the greater the frequency of contacts with doctors, the more prescriptions/sales increase. Regulatory authorities have begun to insert a series of "limits" such as a ceiling on pharmaceutical spending, awards to doctors who prescribe less, regional regulations on ISF (according to Farmindustria it is a limit), introduction of generics, etc. I doctors, for their part, to stem a petulant and insistent group of ISF have become increasingly less accessible, imposing ever more restrictive limitations.
From statistical surveys, the pharmaceutical companies have realized that, despite all this mass of informers, the doctor still has the 4% of what the ISF said (data communicated at a conference organized by Aboutpharma in September 2006).
To the problems highlighted above were added the more general ones of the financialisation of companies, i.e. the search for and maximization of profit in the short or at most medium term, the opposite of what pharmaceutical companies should do which have to invest and immobilize huge resources in research for long periods. For short-term profit, everything has become expendable: the workers, the size, the prestige, the research, the suppliers, the local community in which the plant is located, etc.
All this has led to a change in strategy of pharmaceutical companies: focus on biotechnological products that require few ISF and which are highly profitable, get rid of now superfluous fixed costs (ISF) or at most maintain a very "lean" and "flexible" structure , delocalize or outsource research and production, focus on generics, implement merger or incorporation policies not to make new investments and create jobs but to exploit the research of others and eliminate a competitor to then halve the staff with doubled profits. It is no coincidence that the pharmaceutical industry in 2009 is the only one in the industrial sector to have increased its turnover (ISTAT data). The facet of this strategy is a weak union and low wages.
The ISFs in this picture are among those who have paid the highest price: in Italy at least 10,000 ISFs have lost their jobs (1/3), the 30% of ISFs are less with turnovers increasing! The costs of this havoc obviously fall on the state, i.e. on all citizens.
The closing is emblematic
