Having bought a molecular imaging business from Germany’s Bayer last month, the billionaire head of Piramal Healthcare on Wednesday unveiled the results of his latest trip to the shops: Decision Resources Group, a US health information provider that it bought from Providence Equity Partners for $635m.

Perhaps it’s a bit of both – but will it work?

Yet away from the more obvious groups, a South African pharmaceutical company, Aspen Pharmacare, has been cutting its own path in its domestic market and beyond, aggressively expanding its business from the Philippines to Brazil, largely through mergers and acquisitions.

India’s largest pharma company hailed Synriam – developed in coordination with the Indian government and part of the company’s corporate social responsibility initiatives – as a milestone for the Indian pharmaceutical industry and a vital new therapy in the fight against malaria.

MN Pharma, a privately-held company with 2011 revenues of $200m and a workforce of 1,200, specialises in generic injectable drugs. And because of cost-cutting pressures in the Turkish health system, generics are set to account for an ever larger share of the country’s $10bn pharmaceutical market.

Indian billionaire Ajay Piramal’s flagship company announced on Monday that it had purchased global rights to the molecular imaging research and development portfolio of Germany’s Bayer for an undisclosed amount.

By Shelina Janmohamed of Ogilvy Noor

The race is on to establish powerful international ‘halal brands’. The stakes are high: by some estimates, the global market for halal products is worth $500bn a year.

But it’s a market strewn with confusion, as separate Muslim countries try to establish recognised standards and producers from outside the Muslim world also hurry to enter the market. That leaves many Muslim consumers crying out for reliable brands that will help them guide their choices.

Merck, the US pharmaceutical giant, announced on Tuesday it is building a $1.5bn R&D facility in Beijing. The move follows comments on Monday from Miles White, Abbott chief executive, that companies need to “ride the wave of [EM] growth“.

With the slowdown in the developed world hitting healthcare spending,  pharmaceuticals companies are redoubling their efforts in emerging markets. Some of the world’s top pharma executives on Monday reiterated their faith in EMs, their blossoming talent base and their expanding healthcare markets.

The approvals on Wednesday came at the last moment, just one day before Ranbaxy would be legally allowed to sell the drug, which is expected to generate $500m-$600m in sales for the company in the next six months.

Instead, shares in Ranbaxy, which had global sales of nearly $1.9bn last year, fell 3.88 per cent on news that the FDA had yet to award the company approval to market Lipitor, the best-selling drug in the pharma industry’s history, in the US.

Late on Monday it announced plans to buy a $111.2m controlling stake in Morocco’s Societe de Promotion Pharmaceutique du Maghreb (Promopharm) to secure access to one of the Arab world’s more promising markets.

On Monday Glenmark, the Mumbai-listed pharmaceutical firm, signed a licensing agreement with Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical group, for the development and commercialisation of an antibody discovered by Glenmark.

Shanghai Pharma – which announced the pricing of its Hong Kong IPO on Monday – may benefit from a dearth of new options for those looking for a slice of China’s healthcare boom.

Taisho Pharmaceutical has become the latest in a string of Japanese pharma companies to acquire an emerging market counterpart, as companies search for better prospects as their consumer bases shrink at home.

On Thursday Taisho, the prescription and over-the-counter drug maker, announced the acquisition of Malaysia-based pharmaceutical company Hoepharma Holdings (HOE), which specializes in dermatological products, for nearly ¥10.4bn (US$ 122m).

In buying the maker of a range of brands, including a painkilling ointment called Moov, RB is not the first global group to diversify away from the slow-growing regions in the US and Europe into one of the world’s fastest-growing pharmaceutical and healthcare products markets. And it is unlikely to be the last.

From fashion to pharmaceuticals, the principle is the same: if a global company does not succeed in China these days, it will increasingly struggle to succeed at all. So predictably, the past few weeks have seen a bunch of mergers and acquisitions in the Chinese pharmaceutical sector: deals that may have long been seeded, but which are finally flowering.

GlaxoSmithKline, for example, is understood to be close to buying the Chinese drug company Nanjing MeiRui: part of a “bolt-on” strategy of buying other companies’ medicines in China. That’s a strategy also favoured by other pharma multinationals that want to expand their portfolio in China, without waiting years to get new drugs through the government’s approval process.

Yet, amid all this, there’s further humiliation for Portugal, Brazil’s former colonial master. The shared history, language and business days – Lisbon is currently two hours ahead of Rio de Janeiro – seem to mean little to Brazilian companies as they search for improved economies of scale.

Women’s health is one of those speciality sectors that offers stable growth for pharmaceutical companies. It is therefore unsurprising that Hungary’s Gedeon Richter should want to make leaps into the sector. Today’s €236.5m acquisition of Grünenthal’s oral contraceptive (OC) portfolio will rank the Hungarian company – which has plans to build up a sales network in western Europe – as a leading player in Europe.