Comment by dv_dt
5 hours ago
Every time Ive looked into it marketing is more than half of the costs of US pharma companies - and I would suspect even more as don't know if there has much work to unmask even more of that spending via channels that can occur in ways not obviously marked as marketing or at least are really not core to research and manufacturing.
e.g. is all the "discount coupon" pharmacy rigamarole considered marketing or administration.
This is not correct. Here's Pfizer's 2025 annual report [1]. Total expenses for the year were $55.1 billion. Advertising expenses were $2.7 billion of that, or just under 5%. R&D expenses were $12.1 billion, or just under 22%. They do have a lot of SG&A, but the large majority of that is not going to marketing.
[1] https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000078003/908eb6a...
Advertising is only a subset of marketing. From that doc SGA was ~$11B and R&D ~$12B - basically 50/50. Pfizer is very international, so is pretty difficult to break out US operating costs and what marketing vs R&D is for just the US. But one can also assume US marketing is higher than any other nation as direct-to-consumer advertising is primarily only allowed in the US.