India, Aug. 5 -- First-mover advantage gets studied to death in pharma strategy. Almost nobody studies the other end of the queue- what it actually costs to be approval number five into an already-crowded molecule. In India's generics and specialty-generics landscape, that number is where a lot of investment cases quietly stop making sense, well before anyone updates the model to say so.

The market doesn't split five ways- it splits after four price cuts

Each new approval into a molecule doesn't just add a competitor to divide the pie- it resets the price floor for everyone entering after it. By the time a molecule reaches its fifth entrant, average selling price has typically fallen well below whatever the pre-launch model assumed at p...