Anna Liu
Author's Statement
This memo was written for 88-255: Strategic Decision Making, taught by Professor Russell Golman The assignment asked students to select a real-world scenario and analyze it through one of the strategic frameworks covered in class, demonstrating how that concept plays out beyond the classroom.
Co-opetition, the idea that competing firms can deliberately cooperate in certain domains to create value neither could achieve alone, was the framework I chose to apply. The Pfizer-BioNTech partnership felt like a natural fit: two pharmaceutical rivals who, under the pressure of a global health crisis, turned potential competition into a world-changing collaboration.
Writing this piece changed how I see business strategy. Before this assignment, a partnership like Pfizer and BioNTech’s just felt like a practical response to urgency. But looking at it through the lens of co-opetition revealed something more deliberate, a calculated decision to internalize competition, align incentives, and build shared value. That shift in perspective is what this course and this assignment gave me, a new way of seeing the strategic logic behind decisions that often hide in plain sight.
– Anna Liu
How Pfizer and BioNTech Mastered Co-opetition
In 2020, Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology corporation headquartered in New York, and BioNTech, a German biotechnology company headquartered in Mainz, joined forces to develop Comirnaty, an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine, pooling complementary capabilities to bring the first authorized vaccine to market. The Pfizer-BioNTech partnership during the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an exemplary case study in strategic co-opetition, an approach in which firms compete in some domains while cooperating in others to create shared value. Their collaboration demonstrates how competing firms can leverage complementary strengths to achieve breakthrough results that would be unattainable independently.
Complementary Strengths as a Competitive Advantage
At first glance, Pfizer and BioNTech were rivals in the pharmaceutical space. Rather than remaining pure competitors, they acted as strategic complementors, making their products more valuable together than alone. BioNTech’s mRNA vaccine had strong potential but lacked scalability, while Pfizer, without mRNA expertise, risked falling behind rivals like Moderna. By collaborating, BioNTech contributed pioneering mRNA technology and agile research capabilities, while Pfizer provided global manufacturing infrastructure, regulatory expertise, and distribution networks. This alignment created trade-ons, generating efficiencies that reduced costs while increasing impact. Pfizer’s global supply chains lowered production costs and accelerated distribution, while BioNTech’s agile R&D process enabled rapid innovation without the bureaucratic constraints of a larger firm. As a result, they engineered added value by developing the first authorized COVID-19 vaccine, generating substantial revenue, and providing 500 million doses to support some of the poorest countries. The combined value of their resources strengthened the incentives for cooperation despite underlying competitive tensions.
Prevention of Unhealthy Imitation
Moreover, the partnership mitigated the risk of imitation, a central concern in business strategy. In a purely competitive setting, firms must worry about others replicating their breakthroughs, which can erode any first-mover advantage. Pfizer and BioNTech turned potential imitation into collaboration, effectively internalizing what would have been external competition. Instead of competing against each other, they created a joint profit-maximizing strategy that allowed them to dominate the vaccine market before other competitors could catch up. Rival developers such as Moderna raced independently to develop comparable mRNA and viral vector vaccines, ultimately achieving emergency authorization a week after Comirnaty. AstraZeneca, despite partnering with Oxford, faced manufacturing setbacks and regulatory hurdles that delayed rollout. The impact of these diverging strategies is quantified in Figure 1, which reveals that the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration generated $19.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2021. This performance significantly outpaced those who did not engage in such co-opetition, earning more than three times the revenue of Moderna ($6.0 billion) and over sixteen times that of AstraZeneca ($1.2 billion). By co-opting BioNTech’s mRNA platform, Pfizer pre-empted a competitive threat before it could materialize.
Figure 1. COVID-19 vaccine revenue by manufacturer (First half of 2021). Source:
The Partnership’s Evolution: A Planned Exit
In November 2025, Pfizer sold approximately 54.7% of its stake in BioNTech, reducing its holdings to roughly 1.66 million American Depositary Shares valued at about $163.5 million, signaling a deliberate wind-down of its equity position. This divestment reflects the natural conclusion of a co-opetitive arrangement designed around a specific crisis. Both firms emerged stronger: BioNTech gained global manufacturing credibility and a regulatory track record to advance its oncology pipeline, while Pfizer recaptured leadership in mRNA technology and generated tens of billions in vaccine revenue. A BioNTech spokesperson confirmed that the underlying collaboration agreement remains intact, showing that equity stakes and operational partnerships need not be synonymous. The Pfizer-BioNTech story illustrates a full co-opetition lifecycle, from formation through execution to a value-preserving exit.
Takeaway
The Pfizer-BioNTech partnership demonstrates how co-opetition can transform competition into a strategic advantage by turning a crisis into an opportunity. The collaboration created significant efficiencies and mitigated the threat of imitation, positioning them to lead the vaccine market. This case is not unique: Apple and Samsung co-exist as supplier and rival, Google and device manufacturers compete in hardware while cooperating on Android, and Boeing and Airbus share supply-chain vendors despite fierce rivalry. These examples suggest that co-opetition, when structured with clear boundaries and mutual incentives, can unlock innovation that pure competition or pure cooperation rarely achieves. Business leaders should consider co-opetition not as an emergency measure but as a deliberate strategic option, particularly in capital-intensive industries where no single firm controls all resources required for breakthrough outcomes. Key success factors include clear governance, defined intellectual property ownership, and an agreed exit framework so that the partnership’s conclusion preserves value as effectively as its formation.