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製藥廠顧客利潤之決定因素：個案分析
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H4: A customer’s new product purchase ratio has a positive effect on its profit
contribution to the supplier firm.
2. Design/Methodology/Approach
Due to the Taiwan Bureau of National Health Insurance’s stringent regulations and tight
budget controls, Taiwanese pharmaceutical firms have faced an era of low revenue growth in
recent years. As a result, some pharmaceutical firms have focused their operating resources
on customer needs in an attempt to increase their operating performance through better
customer relations management.
Thus, to measure customer profit contributions and examine its determinants, we
needed to collect customer-specific data such as customer names, characteristics, and sales
and costs associated with each customer. Since customer data are highly firm-specific and
are determined by each firm’s operating policy and customer relations management strategy,
we assumed it would be difficult to collect comparable customer-specific data across firms.
Therefore, we decided to conduct a case study using data from one Taiwanese
pharmaceutical firm to examine the determinants of its customer profit contribution. The
subject company in the case study is one of Taiwan’s top five pharmaceutical firms, and has
been in business for over 40 years. Additionally, this firm has several quality assurance
qualifications, including GMP, ISO9001, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
certification.
Due to the confidentiality of customer-level operating and financial data, the case
company provided us with only one year of data (2002). In 2002, sales of the subject
company exceeded NT$1.5 billion with gross profits close to NT$0.8 billion. Our sample
contains 1,097 observations of individual customers of the subject firm.
To test our hypotheses, we employ a regression analysis. The dependent variable is
customer profit contribution (CustomerProfit), which is sales minus costs (i.e., costs of goods
sold, and direct and indirect sales and administrative expenses) associated with each
customer. The independent variables are customer average order scale (OrderScale), total
annual order amount (Y_O_Amount), maintenance cost (MaintainCost) and new product
purchase ratio (N_P_Ratio). We also include three control variables: a dummy variable for
customer type (Hospital), a dummy variable for contracted customer (Contract), and a
variable for the number of years a customer has been purchasing products from the subject
company (RelationYear). In addition to quantitative data, we obtain qualitative information,
such as operating characteristics, business model, production processes, and financial policy,