Within the chemical universe, the fi ne chemical industry is positioned between the commodity and specialty chemical industries. The latter are their suppliers and customers, respectively. Among the customers, life sciences, especially the pharmaceutical industry, prevail (see Section 9.2 ). In the broad sense, fi ne chemical companies are active in research and development, manufacturing, and marketing of fi ne chemicals. They represent a wide variety of several 1000 enterprises offering mainly products and services along the drug supply chain (see Fig. 2.1 ). They extend from small, privately owned laboratories all the way to large, publicly owned manufacturing companies. However, not all of them encompass all three activities. Whereas Western fi ne chemical companies still dominate in sales revenues, most of the small ones are located in Asia.
Fine chemical/custom manufacturing (CM) companies in the narrower sense are active in process scale -up, pilot plant (trial) production, and industrialscale exclusive and nonexclusive manufacture and marketing. Their product portfolios comprise exclusive products, produced by CM (see Section 12.2.1 ), nonexclusive products, for example, active pharmaceutical ingredient (API)for -generics ( 12.2.2 ), and standard products ( 12.2.3 ).
Contract research organizations (CROs, see Section 2.3 ) provide process development and bench scale synthesis services. Fine chemical companies which are both CM companies and CROs are called contract research and manufacturing companies (CRAMS).
Laboratory chemical suppliers (see Section 2.4 ) offer a large number (thousands) of different kinds of chemicals in small quantities for research purposes.
Finally, there are fi rms that do neither contract research nor manufacturing. They are distributors and/or agents of integrated fi ne chemical companies.
Fine chemical/CM companies account for the largest share of the industry, followed by chemical CROs and laboratory chemical suppliers.