The pharmaceutical industry constitutes the most important customer base for the fine chemical industry (see Table 4). The largest companies are Pfizer, USA; Roche, Switzerland, GlaxoSmithKline, UK; Sanofi Aventis, France, and Novartis, Switzerland. All are active in R&D, manufacturing and marketing. Pharmaceuticals containing more than 2000 different active ingredients are in commerce today; a sizable number of them are sourced from the fine chemical industry. The industry also has a track record of above-average growth. 
The fine chemical industry has a keen interest in the top-selling or "blockbuster drugs", i.e. those with worldwide annual sales in excess of $1 billion. Their number has increased steadily, from 27 in 1999 to 51 in 2001, 76 in 2003, and then levelled off.
Sales of the top 20 blockbuster drugs are reported in Table 6. The APIs of 12 of them are "small" (LMW) molecules. Averaging a MW of 477, they have quite complex structures. They typically show three cyclic moieties. 10 of them exhibit at least one N-heterocyclic moiety. Five of the top 10, up from none in 2005, are biopharmaceuticals. The largest-selling non-proprietary drugs are paracetamol, omeprazole, ethinylestradiol, amoxicillin, pyridoxine, and ascorbic acid.
The innovator pharma companies require mainly custom manufacturing services for their proprietary drug substances. The demand is driven primarily by the number of new drug launches, the volume requirements and the industrys "make or buy" strategy. A summary of the pros and cons for outsourcing from the pharma industrys perspective is given in Table 7. As extended studies at the Stern Business School of the New York City University have shown, financial considerations clearly favor the "buy" option.
Teva and Sandoz are by far the largest generics companies (see also chapter 6.3.2). They differ from their competitors not only in sales revenues but also because they are strongly backwards integrated and have proprietary drugs in their portfolios. They also vie for the promising biosimilars market.
Several thousand small or virtual pharma companies focus on R&D. albeit on just a few lead compounds. They typically originate mostly from academia. Therefore, their R&D strategy is more focused on the elucidation of the biological roots of diseases rather than developing synthesis methods.