The price of generic drugs in India is only about 1% of the Swiss genuine ones.
The effect is similar, but the patient’s burden has dropped by 99%.
Stills of “I’m Not a Medicine God”
Through this movie, most Chinese people know for the first time that Indian generic drugs are so powerful.
Actually, India has a nickname “World Pharmacy”.
About one-fifth of the generic drugs in the world are produced in India, and even people in many developed countries in Europe and America will go to India to buy drugs.
It seems to be great, but the Indian pharmaceutical industry has a serious weakness:
Strongly rely on China’s APIs.
Let’s briefly talk about what is an API?
API, API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient) for short, refers to the raw materials used to produce various preparations.
Pharmaceuticals cannot be taken directly by patients, and must be processed into pharmaceutical preparations.
To put it simply, if you want to produce drugs, you must first have raw materials.
From raw materials to drugs that patients can take
02 Leaving China, the pharmaceutical factory will not survive for a month
The problem is precisely here.
China is the world’s largest producer of APIs, with more than 1,500 API manufacturers in the country.
At the same time, China is also the world’s largest exporter of APIs. In 2019, it exported more than 10 million tons of APIs and earned more than 30 billion US dollars in foreign exchange.
India’s pharmaceutical industry is No. 3 in the world.
About 70% of the APIs of Indian pharmaceutical companies rely on Chinese imports.
According to data, the production capacity of China’s antibiotics, vitamins and other APIs accounts for more than 60% of the world’s total, and more than 50% of exports are exported, accounting for 1/5 of the global market share.
In 2019, India bought more than 800,000 tons of raw materials from China, valued at more than US$5.6 billion.
For example, Trump has repeatedly advocated that hydroxychloroquine is effective against new pneumonia.
India naturally followed Trump’s call to approve hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic drug and increase horsepower production to provide 200 million tablets per month.
However, 90% of the raw materials for hydroxychloroquine produced in India are from China.
The price of hydroxychloroquine raw materials has also risen from Rs 7,800 to Rs 75,000.
Indians make their own statistics on dependence on Chinese APIs