InvestNow News – 9th April – India Avenue – Pharmacy to the world
PHARMACY TO THE WORLD
Given COVID-19 will be one of the most significant pandemics of our lifetime, there has been an increasing focus on health and medicine. In the need of the hour the shortage of medicines is coming under scrutiny. It would have been hard to fathom this sort of event (significant tail-risk) and build production for it. Once we emerge from this crisis, there is likely to be a far greater focus on medicine and its supply chain.
India has evolved as the world’s largest supplier of generic drugs given availability of raw materials, large pool of scientists and engineers and increasing investment into R&D. This investment and growth have been driven by not only exports to the rest of the world, but increased spending on medicine and health insurance and improving accessibility/affordability locally. The country is developing its capability for excellence through entrepreneurship, policy stability (a Pharma Bureau policy think tank), improving compliance and manufacturing standards and creating an ecosystem for development i.e. creating working industry groups, building pharma parks and excellence zones (for example the state of Gujarat is creating two dedicated Pharma Parks – one for drug manufacturing and one for medical devices). The Government of India has been focused on supporting the life sciences industry by granting patent approvals in record times.
Post COVID-19, the industry could benefit from increasing awareness of medicine and spending on healthcare and wellness. With India’s size and scale , large employable population, increasing affordability of medicine and a sizeable amount of drugs coming of patent globally, the opportunity stands before companies like Sun Pharma, Cipla, Lupin, Aurobindo Pharma, Divi Laboratories, Dr Reddy, Cadila Health and Granules India to name a few.