EuroPLX Enters 15th Great Year of Facilitating Pharma Deals
Date of publication: March 6, 2009
With its 40th Meeting forthcoming in June, EuroPLX® (short for European Pharma License Exchange) will enter its 15th year of facilitating pharma deals in the worldwide pharmaceutical and biotech industries. Discussing and negotiating collaborative agreements in a highly organised environment is all what EuroPLX is about.
EuroPLX was designed in 1995 as the world’s first nolecture, no-presentation partnering conference - and has been imitated ever since by various copycats who have come and gone, but never achieved the same quality and reputation as a focused platform for pharma business deals.
Customers were the Midwives!
Who had the idea of an event without any lectures, without any company presentations? The customers of RauCon!
RauCon business development used to be a management consulting firm that organised partnering events since 1987 in order to support its consulting services. These events, held in Europe, Canada, the U.S.A., and Australia were focused on a defined area - e.g. drug delivery technologies or oncology products development - and followed the same pattern: company presentations on the first day, organised face-to-face meetings on the second.
This went fine until a few customers proposed to skip the time wasting presentations and to focus on face-to-face meetings only. EuroPLX was born!
The beginning were stony, though. To convince the industry that a conference without speakers is still a conference wasn’t easy. What to expect? Really, no programme? Just organised get-together? Will that work? Today, the EuroPLX idea is not only widely recognised (and copied), it is presently having its largest event ever, with almost 200 business developers from 35 countries attending EuroPLX 39 Lisbon in early March, in spite of the financial crisis.
With the current economic downturn EuroPLX experiences two distinct trends. For one, biotech and, especially, pharmaceutical companies tend to look more into deriving benefit from partnerships than ever before and seek platforms which offer focused, tangible business opportunities.
And, concerning conferences and seminars, executives now distinguish clearly between must-attend events and nice-to-be-there conferences. More results for the euro or dollar is what companies go for during these days.
Who are Today’s Typical Participants?
Company owners or their family members, Chief Executive Officers, Managing Directors, Presidents, and Vice Presidents usually make up a third of the participants of EuroPLX Meetings. Directors and Heads of Business Development constitute another third. The decision power present is underscored by the size of the deals: some companies have initiated their largest deals ever at EuroPLX.
Age structure? Starting from 28 and running up to almost 80 (yes, in words: eighty). Gender? In the very beginning, EuroPLX was a purely male event, with the appearance of a female business development executive almost being an exotic moment. But female executives are up and coming - more than 30% of the delegates at EuroPLX 39 Lisbon are female!
Anything Else Apart From Business Deals?
Yes, surprisingly. What started as a license exchange and gradually became a platform for pharma business deals in general, is now also a job market and a knowledge exchange. It is not a secret anymore that a sizeable number of executives heard about a vacancy “through the grapevine” at a EuroPLX Meeting and seized the opportunity or referred the information to a friend.
But knowledge exchange? Yes, apart from negotiations, EuroPLX Meetings have evolved into a peer-to-peer knowledge exchange platform where issues such as new target markets, national differences in regulatory and reimbursement practices, valuation, deal structures, portfolio planning, scenario modelling, alliance management and many others are discussed among the delegates who usually represent more than 30 countries from four to five continents. The insider information gained at EuroPLX “sometimes results in drafting completely different strategies” according to participants.
And the information obtained at a EuroPLX Meeting face-to-face is often more genuine, more valuable than information presented at a lecture-type business development conference. Why? Because speakers always have their own agenda. They do not want an anonymous audience to know all they know, because it’s their personal strategic advantage to know more than their peers. But they do want to spread certain information and opinions which will help them reach their goals.
The situation presents itself completely differently face to face at EuroPLX, when the willingness to help another person is stronger than the urge to withhold or modify information for strategic purposes.
What lies ahead?
EuroPLX has evolved from year to year, always trying to improve its services, and 2009 will see a great leap forward with considerable investments into tools which will make attending EuroPLX easier, but at the same time more efficient and more effective.
Curious? All of this will be announced and presented in the EuroPLX Business Developer within the next few weeks.