Global Life Sciences – well- known pharma names maintain improvement

Dec. 20, 2012 - PRLog -- Cutting-edge pharmaceutical company Geneva-based Novimmune - leading the war on the treatment of inflammatory diseases and immune-related disorders – keeps top position, with an overall score of 8.1 of a possible ten marks in the benchmark.

Third is Newron Pharmaceuticals S.p.A, whose mission is discover, develop and commercialise novel drugs to treat diseases of the Central Nervous System (CNS) such as Parkinson’s. Maintaining an overall score of 7.6 this time, Newron have been consistently at the top of our global life science benchmark tables for the last couple of years.

But Medinova AG, which began life in Zurich just after the war as a small pharmacy but which now markets its pharmaceutical products in more than 40 countries around the world, has dropped 47 places after their score dropped from nearly 8 to just 5.4 this time.

Taking their place this time in second place in the survey is Siegfried AG with 7.8, a riser of ten places. Siegfried, headquartered in Zofingen, Switzerland, has been a consistent performer in Sitemorse tests. The company operates worldwide and has around 800 employees manufacturing active pharmaceutical ingredients.

Sitemorse benchmarks the websites of the top companies in this sector four times a year, and we are pleased to see some of the better-known Pharma names such as Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG, Eli Lilley and Sanofi-Aventis in the top thirty performers, something we noticed in the third-quarter benchmark. We’re pleased to see they have retained their positions and even moved up slightly, all scoring between six out of ten in our tests.

Our Q4 2012 benchmark generally though maintains a trend we first pointed out last year, with smaller, more focused players scoring much more highly on quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation (SEO) capability than the larger best-known multinationals.

Sitemorse surveys the websites of businesses and organisations in a number of sectors, and has been benchmarking and publishing the detailed results for a decade. The full results from this and other recent surveys can be seen on our website. Testing is undertaken using automated software that reads the first 125 pages of each site to generate a ranked table.

Other life science company websites we rated among the best include those of GenKyo Tex SA, Piramal Healthcare, Wockhardt, Eisai, 4-Antibody AG, Kuros Biosurgery, and Gebro Pharma AG.

Top climbers include Takedo Pharma AG, up 125 places, Alkaloid, up 95, BioVersys GmbH, up 71 Servier Laboaratories, up 64, and Square Pharmaceuticals, up 63.

Major fallers in this survey include OMIDA AG (-61), Pliva (-69), Perrigo (-77), Altana Pharma (-93) and Ego Pharmaceuticals (-116)

Keeping its unwanted place at the very bottom of the list, with a score of 0.4 out of ten, is Beijing’s Sinopharm Group, though the main websites of Merck, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb are among the bottom ten performers.

It’s worth looking at how the internationally-known pharma names fare in this table; highest is Eli Lilley’s Swiss site, which has risen 9 places to take 14th position. Behind them is the recently-introduced Sandoz Pharmaceuticals AG website which has moved from 18th to 17th position with an unchanged score of 6.51, the same mark as the previous two surveys.

The fastest overall response time for a company homepage stays this time with  Newron Suisse SA, but many of the big names feature in our list of ‘click and wait’ offenders. We think a response time above 0.75 seconds can have a negative effect on user experience, but our tests showed the Johnson & Johnson main site to take on average 37 seconds to load the homepage.

Sitemorse concluded:  This survey, one of a number of sectors reviewed quarterly by Sitemorse, remains the most consistent in scores and recorded rises and falls tend to be smaller than in other surveys we carry out. The top performers this time have scores that are unchanged, a tribute to their consistency. It’s good to see some well-known names towards the top, so well done Sanofi Aventis, Eli Lilley and Sandoz.

Technical Data

This survey took place on November 19th, 2012 and involved benchmarking more than 193,000 URLs. Poorest code quality was recorded for the Chugai Pharmaceutical site which had more than 117,000 failures. Only eight sites were classed as error-free according to Sitemorse criteria, and sixteen had accessibility failures on every page tested.

More information

More information about our surveys and what they test can be found on our website www.sitemorse.com
For further Information: Geoff Paddock, Head of Communications on +44 1525 375057, gpaddock@Sitemorse.com