Company Profile
With a uniquely broad spectrum of innovative solutions, Roche is a leading healthcare company that has for over 100 years been active in the discovery, development, manufacture and marketing of healthcare solutions. Our products and services address prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, thus enhancing well-being and quality of life.
Headquartered in Basel Switzerland, Roche employs over 85 000 people globally and sells its products in over 150 countries. Our multinational presence reinforces our ability to offer our healthcare solutions worldwide and to anticipate needs in all regions of the world.
Roche South Africa employs over 400 people within the pharmaceutical and diagnostics divisions. We are committed to maintaining high ethical standards in our business dealings and in our efforts to protect the environment. In our efforts to be and remain a high quality, service driven company, we subscribe to:
- Being performance driven;
- Being change orientated;
- Having a sense of urgency;
- Powerful teamwork;
- Having trust in people; and
- Caring for our customers.
The Business Today
Today Roche ranks among the world’s leading healthcare companies and has two strong core businesses: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics.
Serving Patients and Customers
Roche’s prime objective is to identify and meet the patients and customer's needs. This implies solving their problems and anticipating their future needs by maintaining close contact with them and listening to what they say.
Within these businesses we prioritise those areas of significant unmet need where we have the expertise to make a difference. Our aim is to develop new and improved drugs, diagnostic tests and services offering significant benefits over existing options.
Focusing on Innovation
By innovation we mean the creation and commercialisation of medically differentiated products and services that lead to a tangible improvement to the health, quality and length of patients’ lives.
As a research-focused company we leverage the latest discoveries and technologies to develop our products.
This is why
- Roche invested over 8 billion Swiss francs in 2017 on research and development.
- Roche continues its longstanding tradition of working in alliances with some of the most forward-looking and technologically advanced companies in the world.
- Roche invests heavily in biotechnology and is the world’s largest biotechnology company.
What does the future hold?
Two patients can have the same diagnosis yet respond in different ways to the same medicine. One patient may be helped by treatment, while the other experiences unwanted side effects without the desired clinical benefit.
Some of this variability is due to genetic and other biological differences between patients. The idea of personalised healthcare is to use insights into these differences at the molecular level to develop treatments and tests tailored to the needs of specific patient populations. This has enormous potential to make healthcare better, safer and more cost-effective.
It will be a while before this potential is fully realised, but the market is clearly shifting away from ‘one size fits all’ products. Roche is a driving force behind this trend and already has several personalised healthcare products on the market. One important aspect of personalising medicine is the close interaction between pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. The fact that we are leaders in both these areas is a source of competitive advantage when it comes to meeting the healthcare.