Security quote of the week

> GSK is spending 20% of its revenue on R&D. For comparison, Intel: $13.56B out of $77.9B (17%).

...20% of revenue on R&D, and *over 50%* of revenue on marketing.

Meanwhile, Intel actually spent $19.7 billion, aka 25% of gross revenue, on R&D. They made about $20.9 billion in net profit, leaving $37.3 billion in non-R&D expenses. Of that, $24 billion was attributable to opearating costs (ie salaries and production costs of goods sold), leaving about $13.3B (18%) for everything else, notably including CapEx for future fab expansion.

(My source for this is Intel's 2020 financial report: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/14... )

> Profit margin for pharma companies is a more complicated story: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7054843/

I'm not sure what your point here is, but okay, let's take the summary of findings of that article:

"In this cross-sectional study that compared the profits of 35 large pharmaceutical companies with those of 357 large, nonpharmaceutical companies from 2000 to 2018, the median net income (earnings) expressed as a fraction of revenue was significantly greater for pharmaceutical companies compared with nonpharmaceutical companies (13.8% vs 7.7%)."

...So large pharma companies have a median profit margin 80% higher than non-pharma companies. That doesn't exactly support the assertion that R&D expenses are bleeding big pharma dry.