increasing regulatory scrutiny of drug safety and efficacy, even as we continue to gather safety and other data on our products, before and after the products have been launched. Our product lines must be replenished over time in order to offset revenue losses when products lose their exclusivity, as well as to provide for earnings growth. We devote considerable resources to R&D activities. These activities involve a high degree of risk and may take many years, and with respect to any specific R&D project, there can be no assurance that the development of any particular product candidate or new indication for an in-line product will achieve desired clinical endpoints and safety profile, will be approved by regulators or will be successful commercially. We continue to strengthen our global R&D organization and pursue strategies intended to improve innovation and overall productivity in R&D to achieve a sustainable pipeline that will deliver value in the near term and over time.

During the development of a product, we conduct clinical trials to provide data on the drug’s safety and efficacy to support the evaluation of its overall benefit-risk profile for a particular patient population. In addition, after a product has been approved and launched, we continue to monitor its safety as long as it is available to patients, and post-marketing trials may be conducted, including trials requested by regulators and trials that we do voluntarily to gain additional medical knowledge. For the entire life of the product, we collect safety data and report potential problems to the FDA and other regulatory authorities. The FDA and regulatory authorities in other jurisdictions may evaluate potential safety concerns related to a product or a class of products and take regulatory actions in response, such as updating a product’s labeling, restricting the use of a product, communicating new safety information to the public, or, in rare cases, removing a product from the market.

Competition Among Branded Products

Many of our prescription pharmaceutical products face competition in the form of branded or generic drugs that treat similar diseases or indications. For additional information, see the “Competition" section in Part I, Item 1, “Business”, of our 2014 Annual Report on Form 10-K.

The Global Economic Environment

In addition to industry-specific factors discussed above, we, like other businesses, are exposed to the economic cycle, which impacts our biopharmaceutical operations globally.

• We believe that patients, who are experiencing increases in co-pays and restrictions on access to medicines as payers seek to control costs, sometimes switch to generic products, delay treatments, skip doses or use less effective treatments. We are exposed to negative pricing pressure in various markets around the world. The U.S. has highly competitive insurance markets, and Europe, Japan, China, Canada, South Korea and a number of other international markets have government-mandated reductions in prices and access restrictions for certain biopharmaceutical products to control costs for the government-sponsored healthcare system, particularly under recent global