Pipeline management future

Portfolio management concepts have been an accepted component of the financial services realm for decades, and the need to diversify risk continues to be an effective organizing principle for many financial instruments and analytic techniques. Risk assessment is also a key component in the pharmaceutical world, where as few as 1 in 5000 laboratory-tested compounds ever makes it to the market. As such, the pipeline portfolio is a critical indicator of the future of a pharmaceutical firm, and the process of analyzing and managing it effectively is of vital strategic importance. 

And even while they were investing in and setting up the infrastructure for this new type of research, companies would have to continue spending on old-style R D to build up their pipelines in the near term, says Viren Mehta, a managing member at Mehta Partners in Manhattan, a small money management and advisory firm that specializes in pharmaceutical and biotech stocks. That would mean doublespending for the foreseeable future. 

The case of Arun may be a telling sign of an era coming to an end - an era where developers of these resources faced much less external scrutiny on their operations and where states, themselves, directed many resource development projects. It is plausible to argue that neither of those two conditions will hold in the future. With the advent of revenue management schemes on the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, in Azerbaijan, and other such arrangements emerging for oil resources, it is plausible to expect that gas projects could some day face similar intervention. 

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