Definition
The term patent cliff refers to the phenomenon of patent expiration dates and an abrupt drop in sales that follows for a group of products capturing high percentage of a market. Usually, these phenomena are noticed when they affect blockbuster products—a blockbuster product in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, is defined as a product with sales exceeding 1 billion USD per year.
Patent Cliff
What is ‘Patent Cliff’
A colloquialism to denote the potential sharp decline in revenues upon patent expiry of one or more leading products of a firm. A patent cliff is when a firm’s revenues could “fall off a cliff” when one or more established products go off-patent, since these products can be replicated and sold at much cheaper prices by competitors. While it is applicable to any industry, in recent years the term “patent cliff” has come to be associated almost exclusively with the pharmaceutical industry.
Explaining ‘Patent Cliff’
The world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms such as Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline stand to lose billions of dollars in revenues from the patent expiration on such blockbuster drugs as cholesterol drug Lipitor and asthma medication Advair respectively. There are numerous firms that have established profitable businesses by manufacturing “generic” alternatives to off-patent drugs, which can be sold at a fraction of the price of branded drugs. The “patent cliff” threat has spurred increasing consolidation in the pharmaceutical industry, as companies strive to replace blockbuster drugs whose patents are expiring with other drugs that have the potential to become big sellers.
Further Reading
- Patent cliff mitigation strategies: giving new life to blockbusters – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- New financing methods in the biopharma industry: A case study of Royalty Pharma, Inc. – papers.ssrn.com [PDF]
- Patents and R&D expenditure effects on equity returns in pharmaceutical industry – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- Patent indicators: a window to pharmaceutical market success – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- Knowledge spillovers and patent citations: Evidence from a survey of inventors – pubs.aeaweb.org [PDF]
