Agrow's Complete Guide to Generic Pesticides: Volume 1, The Companies

Background to reports

Generic pesticides and the companies that produce them are becoming an increasingly important part of the agrochemical industry. A combination of the general decline in the discovery of new pesticide active ingredients (ais) and the steady loss of patent protection on existing ais means that the generic pesticide industry is growing faster than the R&D-based agrochemical industry.

This growth is in terms of both numbers of available ais and total sales. There are no authoritative figures available for the size of the generic pesticide industry, but in 1996 it was estimated to account for around 10% of the global agrochemical industry. Now it is likely to account for 30% of the global agrochemical industry, which means that it generates annual sales of $9,000 million.

This report is the first in a set of three investigating the current state of the generic pesticide industry and market. This first report contains profiles of 100 of the most important generic pesticide companies in the world today. The second report contains profiles of 100 of the most important generic pesticide ais. The third report provides a detailed analysis of the generic pesticide market and industry, and explores the forces that will drive the development of the generic pesticide industry over the next few years. These three reports are updated editions of reports on the generic pesticide industry that Agrow published first in 1998 and then, as new editions, in 2001 and 2005.

In this current edition, a generic pesticide company is defined as a company, or a division of a company, that undertakes as part of its business the manufacture of pesticide ais for which the patents have expired. In the last edition of this report, this definition was extended to cover Monsanto, as it generates the majority of its pesticide sales from post-patent ais, albeit ones that it developed. However, as almost all the major R&D-based crop protection companies now generate a great deal of their sales from postpatent ais, in this edition only pesticide companies producing post-patent ais that they did not originally develop are included.