Quintiles, a biopharmaceutical services company, has been named to Fortune magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies list for 2015.

Quintiles is ranked third overall in Fortune’s Healthcare: Pharmacy and Other Services category with the top ranking for the reputation attribute of global competitiveness and second within the segment for its people management.

Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies list is the definitive report card on corporate reputations. Since 1997, Fortune has identified, selected and ranked the World’s Most Admired Companies, uncovering the business practices that make these companies highly regarded among their peers. 

“I would like to congratulate Quintiles’ employees around the world for making this possible,” said Tom Pike, Quintiles CEO. “Being named one of the World’s Most Admired Companies is a significant milestone in the history of our company.  It is recognition that Quintiles is headed in the right direction to deliver value for customers as we improve their probability of success. It now is up to all of us in the organization to live up to these expectations.”

Quintiles recently entered its 33rd year of operation, having been established at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 by biostatistics professors Dr. Dennis Gillings, CBE and Gary Koch, Ph.D.  The company, which once operated out of a trailer on the UNC campus, now conducts business in approximately 100 countries. 

More than three decades later, Quintiles is the world’s largest provider of biopharmaceutical development and commercial outsourcing services as the company helped develop or commercialize all of 2013’s top-100 best-selling drugs on the market (2014 statistics pending).  

During 2014, Quintiles was recognized as the Best CRO in the U.K. SCRIP awards, named Asia CRO of the Year by Frost and Sullivan, voted Best CRO in Asia in the BioPharma Asia Industry Awards and was named Best Contract Sales Organization in the PharmaField awards, as well as being named to the Fortune 500 for the first time.

The survey employed by Fortune to designate its World’s Most Admired Companies list assesses nine reputation drivers considered to be crucial to a company’s global success including financial soundness, long-term investment value, people management, social responsibility, use of assets, quality of management, quality of products/services, innovation and global competitiveness.

These attributes were developed prior to the inception of the Most Admired Companies rankings in the mid-1980s through a series of interviews with executives and industry analysts to determine the qualities that make a company worthy of admiration.

Raters are asked to evaluate each eligible company on attributes by assigning a score from zero (Poor) to 10 (Excellent). For the purposes of the industry rankings, a company’s overall score is determined through a simple average of the individual attribute scores. Companies who rank in the top half of their industry are defined as most admired within their industry.