2. How have the requirements by pharma companies changed over the years, and how can suppliers manage to live up to them?

The predominant trends within the pharma industry, such as strong growth in generic products, rising R&D costs and increasing regulatory hurdles, are currently driving the need for reducing costs across the industry. This has driven change in the requirements of pharma companies in two major areas: a) intensified concentration of pharma companies toward core competencies lead to outsourcing requirements of other services and b) increased focus on market differentiation of products for survival in the generic environment leads to the need for fast solutions to formulation challenges as well as new formulation approaches. Pharma ingredients suppliers therefore need to be able to assist the pharma companies by providing more support in using their products as well as technologies to enable improved formulations, products or processes. A recent and very visible example for this evolved interaction is co-processed excipients, where existing and well-known materials are combined in a clever physical way using processing expertise to add significant performance advantage in the application. An example of this is BASF's Ludiflash for orally disintegrating tablets. In the long run, the product and industry know-how required is what makes the difference for the suppliers to be a sustainable partner for the industry.