Abstract. The paper provides an overview of current situation of the global pharmaceutical industry, with focus placed on the EU pharmaceutical market, including also the Romanian pharmaceutical market evolution synthetized into a SWOT analysis. As main goal the paper identifies several financial performance influence factors at the level of a number of companies from pharmaceutical sector, in order to generate a particular econometric model. The findings of the paper focus on the prediction of Return on Equity (ROE) ratio as the main performance measurement considered significant for the industry our and a large number of factors which contribute to its changes. Thereof, the paper investigates the relationship between various influence indicators or factors resulting from the financial situation of a company and the performance thereof and generates conclusions for the decisions makers at the level of the companies.

Keywords: economic and financial performance, financial ratios, pharmaceutical industry, quantitative analysis.