| By Liu Yuanyuan, Pharmaceutical Manufacturing News |
| Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
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According to reporters covering CPhI China 2009, one of the most important exhibitions concerning
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pharmaceutical ingredients and allied industries in China, attendance by visitors from outside China saw a slight uptick as compared to last year’s event. Some foreign purchasers of APIs have fallen into difficulties with their cash flow due to the global crisis. As a result, Chinese drug manufacturers sold most of their products originally produced for export to the domestic market to offset the losses caused by a falling demand in overseas markets.
The landscape of the Chinese pharmaceutical market with no changes in its capacity has been consequently changed. Renminbi appreciation has brought a negative impact on the favorable prices of China-made APIs’ and resulted in an
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erosion of competitiveness for domestic pharmaceutical makers. Reporters also found that domestic producers have improved their awareness of intellectual property rights. Chinese companies are starting to develop comprehensive IP strategies, including evaluating risk before introducing products into foreign markets and making applications for IP rights protection, said Kent D. Kedl, General Manager at Technomic Asia, a consultant firm headquartered in Shanghai.
From January to November 2009, China’s production value of chemical APIs amounted to nearly RMB169 billion (approx. US$25 billion), an increase of 25 per cent over the same period last year.
Combined exports and imports of chemical APIs were almost RMB18 billion (approx. US$2.7 billion) and RMB6.3 billion (approx. US$922 million) for the year 2008, rising by 30 per cent and 5.4 per cent year on year respectively. Chemical APIs with high resource and |
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environmental costs, together with medical dressings with high technical
requirements, represent a large proportion of the country’s exported pharmaceutical products. The US and Japan remain the country’s major buyers of APIs, and the size of the two countries’ purchases from China haven’t been affected significantly by the crisis.
A Pfizer survey found that most of the Chinese generic drug and API companies are small, with their research and development investment accounting for less than 2.7 percent of their total investment. In addition, researchers at Chinese pharmaceutical companies surveyed account for less than 7 percent of their total staff.
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