Wavedata looked at the decline in the market price for generics launched since 2012 and compared this with the number of generic manufacturers shown in the price lists they collect.
A total of 186 products were analysed, and any generic manufacturer or licence holder was included, provided they were actually selling a product. The scatter of data points in the graph demonstrates that the more generic license holders there are competing for market share, the greater the decline in the price. As an example, a generic product launched with just a single license holder tended on average to fall to about half its starting price, whereas a product with as many as 15 license holders will probably end up at just a few percent of its starting price.
Obviously, this analysis ignores factors such as the drug tariff price, category M and the difficulty of manufacture, but it suggests that it may be possible to forecast ongoing generic prices. Wavedata collect these prices from pharmacies and dispensing doctors, and have been doing so since the year 2000. Each month over 100,000 prices are collected for generics, parallel imports, UK brands, and devices, and this timely information is added to the Wavedata Live system every 15 minutes, and the historical information is used to produce analyses like these.