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Sandoz makes and sells lower-cost generic and biosimilar medicines, the copycat versions of drugs that have lost their patent protection.
Sandoz is one of the world's biggest makers of generic medicines — copies of brand-name drugs that are sold cheaply once the original patents expire. It also makes biosimilars, which are near-copies of complex biological drugs made from living cells, used to treat conditions like cancer, diabetes, and arthritis. Its customers are mostly hospitals, pharmacies, and health systems that want effective treatment at a lower price.
The business works like this: a drugmaker spends years and huge sums developing a new medicine and holds a patent on it. When that patent runs out, Sandoz and other generic makers step in with the same active ingredient, sell it far cheaper, and compete on price and manufacturing scale. For biosimilars the bar is higher — you can't perfectly copy a living-cell drug, so Sandoz runs extensive testing to prove its version works the same way, which is why biosimilars cost more to develop than plain generics but still sell at a steep discount to the original. Sandoz was spun off from Novartis and began trading as an independent company on the SIX Swiss Exchange in October 2023, with its headquarters in Basel. That separation matters: generic drugs are a volume-and-cost game with thin margins, quite different from the high-margin patented-drug business Novartis kept. Sandoz is betting it can win on scale — it is one of the largest generic players globally, with a big pipeline of biosimilars that are harder for rivals to copy quickly.
The company's main vulnerability is price. Generic medicine is a brutal, crowded market where governments and insurers push prices down, and competitors can undercut each other fast. Sandoz tries to offset that with volume, a broad product range, and the higher barriers around biosimilars, where fewer companies can compete. It also pays a dividend to shareholders and invests in developing new biosimilar launches, which are its best shot at steadier profits than plain generics.
Saved answer · last researched 15 Nov 2026