Depending on your viewpoint, generic drugs represent either the future of the global pharmaceutical industry or an irritating drain on the revenues of R&D based companies. The sector continues to grow in importance, fuelled by the twin pressures of therapeutically significant products coming off patent and health provider demands for lower prices. Analysts in industry and commerce must have a clear understanding of the threats and opportunities in key markets worldwide.

Generics market reports from Espicom Business Intelligence are produced by a multi-lingual editorial team with over 25 years pharmaceutical market experience. And when that experience is combined with one of the best healthcare market databases around, and informed by direct access to over 1200 companies and organisations worldwide, you have unbeatable, reliable, qualified and enriched market analysis. Spain is a very new market for generic drugs; they only began to come onto the market towards the end of the 1990s. Until the early 1990s, local patent laws allowed cheap branded copy products to take a prominent place in the market. Many of these older products are still available, and Spain remains a low price market.

Since 1997, the government has sought to promote generic use as a way of reducing growth in pharmaceutical expenditure. Generics have been increasingly included in reference prices since 1997.

Growth in the generic sector has been impressive in recent years, albeit from a very low base. The generic sector is currently growing twice as fast as the market as a whole, although it still only accounts for 5.4% of the market by value and 9.4% by volume in 2005. By October 2006, this was estimated to have risen to 5.9% by value and 11.6% by volume.

Strong government pressure remains on all pharmaceutical prices. The government extended reference prices to around 2,000 extra products in January 2004, putting pressure on both the branded and generic sectors. The Socialist government elected in 2004 has sought to increase this pressure further, although it is also introducing new pro-generic incentives.

Spain's pharmaceutical manufacturing sector is fragmented but advanced. It is almost entirely concentrated in Barcelona and Madrid. Companies have longstanding expertise in manufacturing copies of existing drugs. The industry is increasingly coming under overseas ownership as the global generic players move into the market.

Low prices make Spain a major source of parallel-trade drugs in the European Union. Spain exported US$3.6 billion of finished drugs in 2004, of which over 35% went to the UK and Germany.

This in-depth report provides a wide-ranging examination of the generic pharmaceuticals market, including the operating environment, current market size, future prospects and five-year market projections.