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You forgot one part:

* You have to finance your highly paid sales staff.

People always claim that pharma companies spend so much money on R&D, but when I look at job ads in the news paper I don't see ads for research positions, but lots of ads for sales positions (from pharma companies).

I'd love to see actual numbers, but I'm pretty sure that sales is at least as costly as research (if not more so)

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Here's some actual numbers for marketing vs research: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...

I believe the sales function is very much incentive driven. As a sales staff, your pay is very much correlated to the sales you do which means the stuff needs to sell. I think of it as, you get money for company and company gives you a small portion of that but in the process company is essentially paying you only when you bring in much more than what you cost.

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