Impact of COVID-19 on Profitability of Pharmaceutical Sector: A Multi Country Analysis
Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted various sectors of the world's economy causing supply chain disruption, implementation of unique practices such as work from home and companies had a hard time continuing their operations in light of the lockdowns imposed by various governments across the world. Profitability plays a major role in deciding the financial performance of every sector worldwide. One of the affected sectors is the Pharmaceutical industry. In this paper we aim to analyse the impact of the pandemic on profitability on the pharmaceutical industry.
We have chosen the 3 largest pharmaceutical listed companies from the top 8 countries most affected by covid-19 as a sample for this longitudinal study to understand the impact of this pandemic on the Profitability of Pharmaceutical Sector. The time period chosen for analysis is January 2015 to December 2019 for establishing the Pre- Covid baseline of profitability and January 2020 to September 2020 as the Post-Covid period. Hypothesis testing has been carried with a confidence level of 95% to check if the differences in mean of profitability are significant or not. We find that the disruptions caused by the pandemic have significantly impacted the profitability of the pharmaceutical industry in a positive manner.