The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sustainable development of pharmaceutical companies: Evidence from Russia

Nowadays there are two perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic: it has become a threat to sustainable economic development and the pharmaceutical industry has turned out to be its main beneficiary. The purpose of this article is to empirically verify the correctness of these statements. The data sample consists of 1771 enterprises of Russian pharmaceutical industry over a 14-year period. The methods used consisted of positioning maps and pairwise comparison of the financial indicators for 2020 with the two most severe crises in the Russian economy (2009 and 2015), as well as with the period of the most sustainable development (2007) and the legacy year (2019). In order to assess the uniformity of the pandemic impact on the industry, we identified analytical groups based on the scale of enterprises and life cycle stages. The main result is to reveal the uneven pandemic impact on the sustainable development of pharmaceutical industry producers. Small young companies were the main beneficiaries of the pandemic. The micro-enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry were the most severely affected. However, the analysis has shown that the pandemic was not the main cause of their instability. In addition, the study as a whole proves the presence of a certain stress resistance of domestic pharmaceutical producers to crises of various nature.