Research a Pharmaceutical Company’s M&A Spend Pharmaceutical companies regularly state that they put so much money into the research and development of products and that is why drugs prices are so high This is true, but you rarely hear them say how much money is spent on marketing and advertising for their products This tutorial will show you how to find the marketing and advertising spend for a pharmaceutical company

Sample Research Question Let’s say a patron comes to the reference desk and asks: “I am curious how much Pfizer spent on there marketing and advertising campaign last year”? Do you know where I can find that type of information”?

Identify Appropriate Website or Database You will want to go to the Pfizer’s homepage Located at:

Investor Relations and Annual Reports Step 1: Most pharmaceutical companies are publicly traded companies and are required by law to report their financial information to the shareholders There will usually be a tab titled “investor relations” or “investors” on the company homepage.

Investor Relations and Annual Reports Step 2: Select the “Investors” tab and locate the “Financial Reports”. You will want to view the annual report for the most recent year. Some companies will have a “Annual Review” and also a “Financial Report” The “Annual Review” will contain the “Financial Report “ information as well.

Parsing out the Annual Report Step 3: Within the Annual Report you will want to locate the “Consolidated Financial Statements” As you can see Pfizer proudly shows their “Financial Highlights” and along with that they show what they spent on R&D. The Marketing and Advertising spend is “mysteriously missing” from this “prominent display”. I wonder why? Well, we will just have to dig a bit deeper in this report. Although Pfizer does have the “Financial Highlights” section in their Annual Review, we will need to back up and access the Financial Report to get the information we need.

Consolidated Statements of Income Step 4: You can see they still do not readily display this information. In the financial summary you see R&D expenses and then a category labeled “other” that has a 25 billion dollar price tag. Well, what is that “other”. If we look further at the “Consolidated Statements of Income” they have to match their revenues against their expenses and this is where we see the lines for “Cost of Sales” and for “Selling, Informational, and Admin Expenses”. Both much higher than the highlighted “R&D” expenditures.

Research Process Diagram Listen to research question Go to the Company’s website Find the Investor Relations Tab Locate the Annual Reports Open up the most recent Annual Report Find the financial statements Locate the consolidated income statement Check out the data

Conclusion Are there any questions related to finding how much a pharmaceutical company has spent on marketing and advertising? Thank you for your time today and we hope this has been a worthwhile educational activity