Segmentation Strategies:Empirical Evidences from Pharmaceutical Companies

The Indian Pharmaceutical sector is highly fragmented with more than 20,000 registered units. The organized sector of India’s pharmaceutical industry consists of 250 to 300 companies, which account for 70 percent of products on the market, with the top 10 firms representing 30 percent. Multinationals represent only 35% of the market, down from 70% thirty years ago. Because of differences in the industry structure and combination of market opportunities for domestic companies and multinationals, they are likely to differ on strategic issues. Hence domestic companies and multinational firms need to pursue different strategies to achieve desired goals. The study covers pharmaceutical companies operating in Madhya Pradesh state of India. The data or information required is related to segmentation strategies adopted by these pharmaceutical companies.The participants are selected from the directory of pharmaceutical manufacturing units in India, published by national pharmaceutical pricing authority.ANOVA is used for testing of hypothesis.The results show that there are visible differences in the segmentation strategies followed by different pharmaceutical companies of Madhya Pradesh. Small & medium domestic pharmaceutical companies have very little inclination towards segmentation strategies. MNCs and large domestic pharmaceutical organizations in Madhya Pradesh are following the segmentation strategies but this is also limited to demographic and geographic segmentation mostly. They also follow integrated segmentation strategies to some extent.