Weight Loss News

Diet Pill Alli's Initial Sales Loured Sales of Diet Drug Acomplia

31 July 2007

How poorly Sanofi's failure to market diet drug Acomplia in the U.S. has affected its sales was apparent on July 25th when GlaxoSmithKline aired the initial sales results for its over-the-counter diet pill alli.

Peddled also as a low-dose Xenical, the sales of over-the-counter alli reached to a surprising mark of $156 million within just few weeks after being launched in the U.S. in mid-June. This sales surge has consequently dwarfed the monthly sales of Acomplia in all member countries of the European Union where it is on sale.

If out of alli's total sales, the number of buyers who bought a one-month supply of the OTC diet pill is alienated; over one million Americans tried the first FDA-approved non-prescription weight-loss preparation within its first week on sale after being launched in the market.

On the contrary, nearly approximately 100,000 to 200,000 people are conceived to have tried acomplia in the European Union over the period of one year after being approved for sale last summer.

Sanofi had primarily expected that Acomplia, which was to be marketed in the U.S. as Zimulti, would be a best-seller medicine, together with the global sales that might even beat the point of $5 billion.

While declaring the sales results for OTC diet pill alli, Glaxo averred that it's large- scale advertising and promotion campaign showered it with over 2.4 billion media mentions since the FDA permitted the diet pill to be marketed in February.

Glaxo further added that it also had received over 4.5 million visits to its website- myalli.com, which in turn, makes it the third-most visited website for any OTC pharmaceutic product.

Presently, Acomplia is sold in 13 European Union nations in addition to Argentina, Mexico and a couple of other countries.