IMS has ennormous potential

For those friends who have worked in pharmaceutical companies and know what a PSUR is, they must be very familiar with IMS (IMS Health Holdings Inc). One of the main methods to acquire patient exposure to a marketed drug is using the IMS sales data to make an estimate. In other words, IMS is the world's leading provider of sales and market research data to companies in the healthcare industry. IMS has a huge competitive advantage over other such companies. Think about it: you cannot retrospectively create time-related data. Either you have tracked such historical data or you don’t have it. It is that simple. IMS has accumulated a huge amount of healthcare data in the past 70 years, which is not other healthcare information companies can produce when needed. IMS has the data sources from more than 100,000 data suppliers and been working with over 9,500 healthcare professionals in 100 countries. That why IMS can provide the necessary data to customers from doctors and clinical researchers, to hospitals and biopharmaceutical companies, and even health authorities. The uniqueness of IMS in this industry is reflected in the fact that its client retention rate reached an unheard of 99% with an average relation length of 25 years among its top 25 customers. Simply put, no other companies can really compete with IMS when talking about healthcare sales, marketing and utilization data.

That’s why IMS is a company with enormous upside potential. IMS posted a profit of $82 million, with $2.5 billion in sales for 2013. Over the long run, I’m pretty sure IMS will continue to be doing well financially. It has the information products no other people can provide or replicate. IMS has just gone public recently with an IPO price of $20 but as usual it was shooting up quite high on the IPO debut. It is currently trading at $24, which is a bit pricy. Buy IMS at its weakness.