Pharmaceutical companies are thought has rich giants with many resources available to them. However, they optimize manufacturing costs for small molecule chemical entities by outsourcing parts of the manufacturing, forming alliances with chemistry suppliers or basing their operations in low cost countries, like Puerto Rico. This works well for chemistry but for biological entity manufacturing, the costs, structures and people are still greater and pharmaceutical companies have set up unique strategies to optimize their benefits. This is a great investment risk. If it takes a$1B to make a manufacturing plant and you have only 2 products to support it then you are taking a risk of $1B. However, if you have a partnership that has 4 products then your risk has essentially been halved. Thus, it makes it symbiotic for both the companies and is a good business practice too. There are a few examples in the last few years:
Amgen and Watson: Dec 2011. Probably, Biosimilars for Herceptin, Rituxan, or Avastin for oncology. Watson provides $400M in cash or in-kind service including commercialization and marketing of products whereas, Amgen provides development, manufacturing and commercialization.
Biogen Idec and Samsung: Dec 2011. Joint venture called Samsung Bioepis for Biosimilars. Samsung contributes 85% of the $300M deal for a venture that based in Korea and will contract with both Samsung Biologics and Biogen Idec.
Merck and Medimmune (AstraZeneca): Sept 2011. Manufacturing capacity sharing agreement for 15 years for the Frederick, MD plant. MedImmune gets load balancing of excess capacity whereas Merck gets a proven manufacturing facility.
In all of these there is a non-compete clause with the drugs already manufactured by the Pharmaceutical Company. The deals are also structured so that if one of the partner requires additional resources then they pay out of their own resources (Pharmaceutical Technology, Aug 2012, s 28). However, Joint ventures and capacity sharing agreements are complicated agreements that require both the sides to cooperate equally and time will tell how these arrangements get established for all the players in the market