The pharmaceuticals sector has overtaken technology hardware as the top global investor in research and development, according to the European Commission’s annual international scoreboard of corporate R&D spending.
Among individual companies, Pfizer, the US drug maker, comes top of the scoreboard published on Friday, with an R&D investment of €5.8bn ($8.2bn, £4bn) in 2006. Until now one of the large car manufacturers has always topped the individual spending league.
