The pharmaceuticals sector has overtaken technology hardware as the top global investor in research and de-vel-opment, according to the European Commission's annual international scoreboard of corporate R&D spending.

Among individual companies Pfizer, the US drug maker, comes top of the scoreboard published yesterday, with an R&D investment of €5.8bn ($8.2bn, £4bn) in 2006. Until now one of the large auto manufacturers has always topped the individual spending league.