Interview: Playing to win

There are few chemical companies who would presume to mention their name in the same breath as Apple and Starbucks, yet Sigma-Aldrich was flanked by these two giants – behind Apple but ahead of Starbucks – as the top three companies to have outperformed the NASDAQ 100 index since its peak in March 2000.

‘Having said that, the fact that we have performed well over the past 15 years is not a guarantee of success,’ says Gilles Cottier, President of SAFC, the commercial arm of Sigma-Aldrich. ‘It is probably the reason why we need to continue to change and continue to listen to our customers.’

Over the past two decades the global pharmaceutical landscape has changed radically and an ageing global population, the advance of personalised medicine – and particularly the rapid growth of the affluent middle class in the emerging world – will ensure that demand for pharmaceuticals will continue to grow, Cottier states.

‘I believe that our customers need to make their products available not only to the 1–1.5 billion consumers in the developed countries. They also need to make them available and affordable in the next 5–10 years to 5–6 billion consumers,’ he says. ‘And these consumers do not have and will not have even by the end of this decade, the same standard of living as the average consumer in the West. But they still want to have access to these drugs.’

This means that not only will the average cost of the drugs have to fall to make them affordable, but there will also be the additional challenges of making the products available in countries without the distribution and storage infrastructure to optimise their shelf-life.

‘Basically the cost of the drugs needs to come down, but at the same time the volume is going to increase three- or four-fold,’ Cottier states. ‘But quality is not going to get less, so I believe that this dynamic is going to change the industry and the way it operates.’