“Last year I would get as much as 2,000-euro bonuses every three months, but the situation has changed this year, because our sales have gone down, too. I only got one bonus after six months of sales and it stood at almost 500 euros.”
This is how Daniel, 30, a graduate of the Medical School, sums up the current situation of the “incomes” in the pharmaceutical industry, one of the less affected markets by the current crisis. He has been working for a Top 20 pharmaceutical company for nearly four years now.
The same goes for most other medical representatives, who are now seeing their incomes seriously shrinking as a result of the crisis, given that the pharmaceutical market started to go down in midyear. However, even though bonuses are far from what they were last year, the number of people who qualify for such bonuses is not as high as it used to be. The number of medical representatives getting bonuses this year is three times lower compared with 2008, given that the difficult situation of the industry is preventing many of them from reaching the sales targets set at the beginning of the year.
“The number of those that qualify for bonuses has gone down to barely 10% this year. In 2008, approximately 30-50% of the medical representatives qualified,” said Marius Saulea, national sales manager of Egis Pharmaceuticals Romania.
Pharmaceutical companies usually recruit medical representatives from among medical school graduates to promote their products to doctors, and the salary package is made up of a fixed income plus bonuses that vary with sales. At those companies where the base salary is very small, one could double it through bonuses last year. For other companies, bonuses could reach one or one and a half salary in three months. A medium-sized company has 40 or 50 medical representatives, while other groups employ as many as 100 people for such positions.
Another trend on the workforce market as far as the pharmaceutical industry is concerned is to have employers raise salaries so as to partly offset the lack of bonuses.